Uthman Wahaab, Back With Me Again, setup with artist, Lagos Biennial 2019.
Born Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria (1983), lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria
Back With Me Again 2019
Charcoal and Contè crayon on paper
Courtesy of the artist
In 2008, Uthman Wahaab began an online friendship with Chichi, a woman he encountered on the now-defunct Yahoo! Chat instant messaging platform. The two met a year later after extensive virtual dialogue. During this encounter, Wahaab learned of Chichi’s intense insecurity about her weight. Although their friendship was short lived, Chichi became a muse of sorts, inspiring Wahaab’s decade-long interest in using visual representation, principally drawing and painting, to challenge body image standards by celebrating and normalising the corpulent female form. In this ambitious drawing, Wahaab takes inspiration from his own family photographs to offer a fictional account of Chichi’s life, depicting her as a self-determined and confident woman during ordinary social, religious, civic and familial events.
