From Sand Drawings to Epic Journeys – THISDAYLIVE

Hassan Aliyu’s 40-year retrospective at Wolfson College and ArtSpace 5–7 in Cambridge, UK, traces a life and practice shaped by movement and memory, and by the persistent work of making art in the wake of displacement. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports 

“My calling in life was to be an artist,” Hassan Aliyu declares. From the inner recesses of memory, he dredges up a moment from his childhood. As a young boy kneeling in the sand, he is drawing shapes with his fingers. Absorbed in the act itself, he seems barely aware of the war raging around him. Then a wind sweeps across the ground, wiping everything clean, as though nothing had ever been there. He pauses. Then begins again. That repetition—marking, losing, and starting over—would, in retrospect, reveal the first flickers of a calling. Back then, it was simply a child’s pastime.

Over the years, he has returned to overlooked chapters of the past, working through fragments and gaps to hold together what displacement has scattered. This impulse finds fuller expression in the ongoing retrospective Epic Journeys, mounted at Wolfson College and ArtSpace 5–7 in Cambridge, UK, and running until June 30. The exhibition is both a celebration and an opportunity to reflect on what has been lived through. Spanning 40 years of work, it traces a practice shaped by movement and migration as much as by paint, collage, and conceptual inquiry. Viewed as a whole, the exhibition reveals a world in motion—memories of migration, journeys between cultures, and fluid identities.

Born in the UK in 1964 to Nigerian parents who arrived during the post–Second World War wave of Commonwealth migration, Aliyu’s early life was shaped by the contradictions of empire’s afterlife. His parents had come in search of education and opportunity, joining Britain’s postwar rebuilding. But the promise of the Mother Country soon gave way to racial hostility and exclusion. As housing became increasingly unstable, Hassan and his twin sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Auchi, southern Nigeria.

What might have offered stability became yet another shift in an unsettled childhood. In 1967, the Nigerian Civil War broke out. Those early years—marked by movement and disrupted belonging—echo in his later work, where fractured forms and unfinished surfaces become ways of holding memory.

By 1970, after the war, he and his sister rejoined their mother in Zaria. The movement continued—Kaduna, then Jos—each relocation bringing disruption. In Jos, he attended boarding school, but during these years art shifted from interest to necessity.

His father had hoped he would study law or politics. Instead, Aliyu chose a different path, enrolling in fine art at Ahmadu Bello University. He graduated in 1986 with the Nigeria Art Council Award for Best Final Year Student and entered professional life just as Nigeria was beginning to feel the weight of economic strain.

That same year, the Structural Adjustment Programme—commonly known as SAP—reshaped everyday life in visible ways. Inflation, currency devaluation, and austerity affected not only the economy but artistic practice itself. For many artists, survival meant rethinking the very materials they worked with. 

For Aliyu, this became a turning point. Collage, appropriation, and reuse emerged not only as aesthetics but as response. Found materials—packaging, print fragments, torn documents—began to appear in his work and remained, while shredded banknotes and commercial debris became embedded in layered surfaces, making economic systems visible in material form.

In this sense, what began as necessity became method. Meaning was embedded in the materials themselves—history embedded in texture and construction. This resourcefulness extended beyond the studio. With limited infrastructure and few exhibition opportunities, artists often had to become their own organisers, and Aliyu embraced this reality. “The artist had to be his own agent and dealer,” he recalls. “We took art to where art did not previously exist.”

Art, for him, has never been confined to galleries. He has worked as artist, organiser, educator, and advocate—often simultaneously. Collaboration became necessity. Where institutions did not exist, they had to be built.

In 1990, an invitation to exhibit in Britain shifted his trajectory. He travelled to London intending a short stay, but political instability in Nigeria made return increasingly difficult. A visit became migration.

Arrival in the UK brought little relief. Despite being British-born, Aliyu encountered exclusion and racism within the art world. Rather than softening his practice, this sharpened it.

Over decades, his work has engaged histories of slavery, colonialism, inequality, and structural injustice—not as themes, but as continuing conditions. His practice operates as inquiry into how history persists in the present.

This culminated in his doctoral research, Enslaved by Debt: An Artistic Exploration of Africa’s Colonial Legacy, which traces colonialism’s transformation into systems of economic dependency and control.

Yet the work is not only political. It remains deeply sensory. Colour in his paintings is unstable—merging, breaking, flaring across surfaces. Rhythm and movement are embedded in composition itself.

Earlier works depicting runners, cyclists, and boxers carry this energy. Thick impasto gives form a sculptural presence; motion becomes material.

His collages extend this logic. Built from fragments, they appear chaotic before revealing internal structure—chains, figures, text, and symbols accumulating into slow-forming visual systems.

The exhibition’s title Epic Journeys is apt. “Epic” gestures to storytelling across generations and geographies. Aliyu works like a visual griot, weaving personal memory into collective history. The works do not conclude; they continue. “Journeys” is equally crucial. There is no single path—only crossings between Britain and Nigeria, memory and history, biography and politics. Migration is not an event but a condition.

Standing before the work, what remains is persistence rather than resolution. Images fracture, but endure. In this sense, the work returns to the child in the sand. The marks are made. The wind comes. They disappear. And still, the drawing begins again.

Epic Journeys reveals an artist who has turned movement into method. Across decades and continents,  Aliyu’s practice holds to a simple conviction: that art can carry memory, register injustice, and remain open to renewal. History is never fixed, identity never final, and even what is erased leaves a trace.