Artist: Ikulaye
Title: Contraceptives
Medium: Photography
In Contraceptives, Ikulaye presents a layered exploration of reproductive rights through the body. Using symbolic contraceptive objects arranged across the body’s surface, the work interrogates how societies shape our understanding of sex, safety, and autonomy.
The exhibition features conceptual photographs and a documentary-style video that follows the artist in the hours leading up to the performance. This visual journey reveals the emotional and mental terrain behind the work: the discipline of embodiment, the quiet negotiations of identity, and the resilience required to speak the truths often hidden.
At its core, Contraceptives questions access. Who receives education? Who is denied information? Whose health is prioritized? Through intimate imagery and reflective narration, the piece pushes viewers to confront stigma and consider the human cost of silence around contraception and reproductive care.
The body becomes a site of memory, politics, and advocacy-an archive carrying personal and collective histories of restriction and reclamation.
CONTRACEPTIVES (pills)
Contraceptives is a body-based performance and photographic work that examines how society shapes the way young women and LBQ women- understand their bodies, their choices, and their access to reproductive health. This piece emerges from my experiences growing up in a culture where fear was taught more openly than knowledge, and where responsibility was placed on girls long before clarity was ever offered to them.
In this work, I use my body as a site of questioning a surface where silence, stigma, and expectation collide. The contraceptive items placed around me function not as medical tools, but as symbols: markers of autonomy, access, restriction, and the ongoing struggle for the right to make informed decisions. By bringing these objects into visual conversation with the body, I challenge the systems that make education scarce, access unequal, and health a political battlefield.
The documentary-style video accompanying the photographs traces a full day of my process, revealing the interior rituals and emotional landscapes that precede the final performance. This quieter narrative is important to me; it holds the humanity behind the advocacy. It shows the labour of being a body that carries expectations, questions, and histories while still insisting on truth.
Contraceptives is ultimately a call for clarity, safety, and dignity.
It asks why reproductive health remains inaccessible for so many.
It asks why education is withheld.
It asks why the choice still needs to be defended.
Through this work, I reclaim the body as a space of truth-telling—one that demands attention, demands empathy, and demands change.
Artist: Esther
Title: Can’t We Listen
Medium: Print and Poetry Performance
Can’t We Listen is presented as both print and performance, using poetry to confront how laws, religion, and politics weaponize the body while silencing thewoman. This work resists that erasure, amplifying survivor voices and restoring the urgency of truths too often muted. Through language as defiance, it reclaims space, demands accountability, and insists that listening is the first act of justice in the struggle for reproductive rights. Gender Based Violence, Collective Action, Safer World, Poetry as Protest.
Artist: Beatrice Arogundade (Queen Bee)
Title: Gender Blunder
Medium: Mixed-Media Digital Collage with Participatory Public Engagement
Gender Blunder exposes the pervasive yet often overlooked realities of gender-based violence through a digital collage of headlines, fragmented testimonies, and shadowed silhouettes. By bringing these buried stories into view, the work challenges collective silence, affirms the urgency of believing survivors, and underscores the shared responsibility to report abuse and support justice. Reclaiming bodies, choices, and dignity through art.
Artist: Aejsi
Title: B.A.R.E. Bodily Autonomy Rights Evolution (The spilling)
Medium: Mixed-Media Portraits
This series presents three multimedia portraits that give voice to experiences often pushed into silence: forced pregnancy, contraceptive sabotage, marital rape, and denial of reproductive care. Each portrait confronts how power is used to control bodies and limit choice, revealing the urgent need for autonomy, safety, and consent. Together, they call on viewers to recognise that choice matters, and to demand consent, both in intimate relationships and in every form of reproductive care.
Artist: Adeola Abdul
Title: WHAT WERE YOU WEARING
Medium: Mixed-media installation
This installation challenges victim-blaming by displaying clothing worn during assaults, paired with the survivor’s statement: “This is what I wore. Why is that your question?”By centering these garments and the stories behind them, the work challenges the harmful fixation on survivor behaviour and redirects responsibility to where it belongs – on perpetrators. It demands accountability, empathy, and a culture that protects bodily autonomy. Gender-Based Violence, Survivor Narratives, 16 Days of Activism, No excuse, Social Justice, Clothing Installation, Advocacy Art.
