The Fragility of Ancestral Time

Heliconia Projects presents The Fragility of Ancestral Time, a group exhibition of four international artists: Francisca Sosa Lopez, Clara de Tezanos, Cecilia Fiona, and Olamide Ogunade. Spanning sculpture, photography, painting, and textiles, the exhibition touches on how time is a fragile construct – our connection with the past, present, and future is fleeting.
The Nigerian artist Olamide Ogunade’s portraiture reflects on moments in time. Ogunade’s oeuvre meditates on the presumption that time is abstract albeit finite, while moments are everlasting. The artist depicts women from the past, so as to show that this too shall pass. Any hardships those women have gone through, they have survived in a resilient way and are now in the present moment - which is the only moment that is everlasting. He argues that time may seem like a fast moving construct, yet the moments we create are time-bending in their permanence. The Nigerian artist equally comments on the female gaze through his depiction of empowered women. Using a mix of bold colours and masterfully painted prints, Ogunade tears down stereotypes of the West African woman as a dependent and further parleys on the theme of individualism. The unique contrast of his use of charcoal for his subjects paired with the saturated background creates a luminosity and elegance in the human form.
Olamide Ogunade’s portraits are shown at The Fragility of Ancestral Time just next to the artworks by Cecilia Fiona, Clara de Tezanos and Francisca Sosa Lopez. All of them have been uniquely inscribed in the conceptual framework inspired by the Walter Benjamin’s quote:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

The Fragility of Ancestral Time is the second show of Heliconia Projects, a nomadic gallery that was launched in January 2024 by Nicole Bainov and Elsa Maldonaldo-Buitron in the heart of the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic. Heliconia Projects replaces a typical gallery program with a series of crafted pop-up shows that connect carefully curated art with unique, atypical venues and their communities. Casa Velazquez Calle Luperon #53 Cidudad Colonial RD www.heliconiaprojects.com