Published by THISDAY, this critique by Yemi Adebisi examines Lateefat Tobun’s Silent Realities as an exploration of identity, connection, cultural continuity and collective progress.
Adebisi focuses on the two figures whose bodies are visually connected through a continuous textile pattern. Although the figures remain distinct, the shared pattern creates a sense of cultural inheritance moving across both forms. The critique reads this device as a way of considering identity not as something separated by movement, but as something carried, reshaped and sustained through memory, relationships and cultural knowledge.
The article also considers the work through the experience of migration and changing ideas of home. Rather than presenting movement as a clean division between past and present, Silent Realities suggests that culture and memory continue across places. Belonging is therefore understood as something reconstructed through new circumstances without requiring the abandonment of what came before.
Adebisi also addresses a tension within the work. By joining the two figures so completely through a single visual fabric, the composition risks allowing collective identity to overwhelm individuality. The critique argues that this unresolved tension strengthens the work by complicating an otherwise straightforward interpretation of connection and togetherness.
Within the context of Nkosoo, or progress, the critique reads Silent Realities as proposing an alternative understanding of advancement. Progress is presented not simply as movement forward or separation from the past, but as the ability to carry memory, culture and inherited histories into new environments while creating new forms of connection and belonging.
