ÌPADÀBỌ̀

IPADÀBỌ̀, a conceptual exhibition, translated from the Yoruba language of the western part of Nigeria as “The Return,” explores both a physical and psychological homecoming.

In this body of work, Ajayi Damilare Elijah (Snoz) navigates the layered realities of returning to a homeland that is at once familiar and transformed. Born in Nigeria and raised in Malaysia, his practice emerges from the tension between memory and present experience, between inherited identity and lived reality.

Rather than presenting a singular narrative, Ajayi embraces complexity. The community he encounters upon his return is not the one he recalls from memory back, but a space reshaped by time, politics, religion, and evolving social structures. His works reflect this shift, offering perspectives that are both celebratory and critical, intimate and observational.

Employing a visual language rooted in conceptual symbolism, Ajayi integrates recurring motifs, abstracted figures, some somewhat realistic images and coded markings inspired by African iconography and contemporary culture. These elements form a personal path through which lived experiences are translated into layered visual narratives.

Through mixed media, the artist constructs textured surfaces that mirror the diversity of his themes. Fabric fragments reference continuity and identity, while repurposed (up cycled) materials such as bottle tops evoke ideas of consumption, fragmentation, and reconstruction.

Ajayi makes his art happy, and gleeful. Even though certain messages might seem too deep, the playful characters makes the art more interesting and this goes deeper to give an insight about the artist and how he sees life in general.

Ultimately, IPADABO is an act of reconciliation, an attempt to understand displacement, embrace change, and find balance within evolving notions of home and belonging.

Most exhibitions leave almost nothing. The work goes home or goes out, the room is repainted for the next show, and within a few years what happened survives only in the memory of the people who were in the room and a handful of photographs nobody can date.

Planet-B is an archive of human contribution. It keeps records of what people made, with enough evidence attached that someone can check them later. ÌPADÀBỌ̀ is preserved here as a contribution to art, culture, identity and memory, made by an artist the archive can verify.

The exhibition is the artist’s. The archive is only where it is kept.