Nigerian Artist Lateefat Tobun Uses Paintings to Explore What Migration Does to Identity
- Multidisciplinary artist Lateefat Tobun built her professional practice around questions of cultural survival and inherited identity after migration
- Tobun's paintings deliberately avoid crisis imagery, focusing instead on what happens to communities and cultures long after displacement ends
- Her work has drawn attention from fields beyond contemporary art, including migration studies, public history, and cultural policy
Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Lateefat Tobun has developed a body of work that reframes what migration means as a subject for art, shifting focus away from the journey itself and towards the lives, memories, and cultural inheritances that continue reshaping people long after they have arrived somewhere new.
Tobun established her professional practice in 2020 and has since built a recognisable body of work around a set of recurring questions: what cultures carry across borders, how traditions change shape in unfamiliar environments, and what responsibilities communities inherit alongside the practices they bring with them.
Source: Original
The Stories That Begin After Arrival
Rather than depicting border crossings or displacement in its most visually dramatic forms, Tobun's paintings locate themselves in quieter, more sustained moments. Works such as "The Weight We Carry," "Ori Inu (The Silent Companion)," and "Mending the Gap" each approach the same underlying concern from a different angle, using figures, objects, and gestures to explore how identity becomes more layered rather than more resolved when people move between places.
The approach sets her work apart from a significant portion of contemporary art addressing migration, which tends to reach for imagery already associated with crisis. Tobun's interest lies in the period after that imagery loses its grip, in the family rituals, inherited habits, and private memories that continue organising daily life once the original place has been left behind.
Her understanding of culture treats it less as a fixed possession and more as something that travels, adapts, and transforms, shedding certain qualities and absorbing new ones, without ever quite disappearing.
Influence Beyond the Gallery
That framework has drawn Tobun's work into conversations beyond the contemporary art world. Educators, migration researchers, public historians, and cultural policy practitioners have each found her perspective relevant to their own fields, though what keeps the paintings from becoming illustrative of any single argument is their insistence on remaining grounded in recognisable human experience first.
As migration continues to alter the composition of societies globally, there is growing demand for artists to interpret those shifts for wider audiences. Tobun's approach offers something different from direct interpretation. By paying close attention to what persists, what adapts, and what quietly disappears across generations and geographies, her work opens questions that extend well beyond any particular political or policy debate.
Source: Legit.ng
