Born in 1979 to Nigerian parents, Chiedu Okonta is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Throughout his years of formal and self-directed study, he has built a creative practice that unveils layers upon layers of semiotic meanings while remaining grounded in current socio-political critique. Working across painting, drawing, print, and sculpture, the artist embraces the richness of his native culture to address pressing global issues. He situates his work in what he calls a “contemporary movement focused on archiving, reporting, agitating, raising awareness and questioning through objective positioning”.
For Okonta, art emerges as a tool for interrogating systemic inequalities and unethical industrial endeavours. The artist’s focal point is the devastating effect of extractivism in the Niger Delta, along with the broader impacts of natural resource exploitation in Africa. With a background in Civil Engineering, he integrates technical precision with deep empathy, creating counter-hegemonic worldviews that invite viewers to reflect on their place within a shared human experience – and imagine futures of balance and belonging.
Textures of Practice
Though Okonta works mostly within the two-dimensional bounds of canvases, his works reveal a kaleidoscope of different symbols, temporalities, and affects. What at first glance might strike as a realistic depiction soon opens a portal to a more surreal dimension of endless significance. In his paintings, signs of environmental slow violence meet visions of resilience and regeneration; traditional techniques meet disruptive subject matters.
His early work, Tetris (2021), for example, might at first strike as just another still life. On further inspection, however, the careful arrangement of musical instruments presents a real semiotic richness, evoking their cultural and social value – from storytelling and merriment to messaging and signalling. The painting doubles as a cultural map, paying tribute to – as Okonta discloses – the monthly hometown meetings his father once chaired. Though the artist paints within the Western tradition of still life, he uses the work to channel his native culture, with its emphasis on familial continuity and responsibility.
A similar formal and thematic multitude characterises the artist’s recent piece Exploitation’s Tattoo (2025). In yet another disruption to the Western canon, the painting positions itself in dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Salvator Mundi. The viewer is presented with Okonta’s signature symbolic overlay; the figure’s skin and clothing hide military medals, jewels, bank notes, or even kneeling silhouettes – all drenched in contrasting shades of blue and orange, speaking to Okonta’s theorisation of the painting as an “outcry from a disjointed and unbalanced world”.
Extractivism, Exposed
The ecological devastation of the Niger Delta – oil spills, gas flares, air pollution – marks a recurring thread throughout Okonta’s work. The artist, however, refuses to reduce the region to a site of suffering. While he acknowledges past tragedies – like the execution of Ogoni Nine, a group of activists opposing the ecocide at the hands of the petroleum industry – he casts a hopeful look towards the future, asking “what comes next?”.
In this vein, the artist drenches his 2025 work Focus Alat (also called FUBU: For Us By Us) in luminous golds, evoking not only the century-long exploitation of the Niger Delta’s natural resources – “white gold” of ivory, “red gold” of palm oil, or “black gold” of crude oil – but also its inherent richness. He reclaims the (neo)colonial figurations of the region’s goods as “gold”, imagining a brighter future – or, as he puts it, a “cognitive renaissance” wherein extractivism and corruption are no longer commonplace. The painting explores the endless relationship between environment and exploitation, while hinting towards the rest and restoration that awaits outside of that violent frame.
Oil Shores (2025) presents a similarly textured approach to extractivism in the Niger Delta. Therein, Okonta paints a tale of industrial-scale harvesting’s interruption to the communities’ harmonious relationship with nature, steeped in his usual layer of symbolism. A more satirical register emerges in The Dancing Elite (2023), a caricature outlining absurdity of elites celebrating wealth extracted from the destruction of communities The image has been reproduced across various contexts: from the artist’s website logo to an installation featuring petroleum-degraded plants in an oil drum ‘vase’, serving as a recurring presence in his oeuvre – and a reminder of Okonta’s key concern.
Past Futures / Future Pasts
Resistance to linear time lies at the core of Okonta’s creative practice. The artist’s engagement with alternative temporalities is two-fold. Aware of people’s dwindling attention spans, he purposely messes with traditional configurations of time to captivate his audience. He strives to evoke deep reflection instead of passing interaction. All the while, he nods towards non-Western attitudes to temporality. In his works, Okonta favours simultaneous presence and non-linearity over time’s straightforward figurations. Among these, he highlights the importance of hauntology – the persistence of the past in the present – to his artistic vision.
On his canvas, ghosts of times past exist alongside utopian visions of days to come. A 9JA Delta Speculative Future, renamed to We No Go Wear Hoodie for House (2023), imagines what Okonta deems “a wish, a dream, or perhaps one day a reality”: the Niger Delta as a rejuvenated region bathed in greens and blues. The artist highlights that this utopia is more effective than literal; what he hopes to represent through the painting is the dreamy feel of the place, a sense of hope and peace. Yet, a brutal past continues to haunt these visions, as the central figure – the artist himself – sits on an oil barrel, reminding the audience of the violence that continues to shape the region’s everyday reality.
A Tale of Heritage, a multi-media series started back in 2023, further broadens the temporal scope of Okonta’s work, traversing centuries of exploitation and natural resource extraction in southern Nigeria. The Mariner’s Astrolabe (2024), for instance, interrogates the cultural influence of Benin bronze sculptures on African artists. In The Untitled Saltcellar Allegory (2025), meanwhile, the artist takes the eponymous vessel – a local ivory creation historically exported as decor to affluent European homes – as a symbol of the lingering impact of exploitation in the region. Time collapses between the cycle’s paintings, digital artworks, and sculptures: colonial extraction and contemporary petro-capitalism become two movements of the same historical cycle.
Okonta left Nigeria in 2010 to pursue a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at the University of East London. Following his graduation in 2012, he lectured on the subject across various academic institutions. For all his engineering work, Okonta could not completely abandon his passion for art. “Even in my late twenties, when I tried to run away from it and just be an engineer, I still could not”, he says in an M—A (A SPACE BETWEEN) interview. It was after the COVID-19 pandemic that he finally answered his creative calling and enrolled in an arts programme. Having received a graduate diploma in Art & Design, Okonta was awarded the prestigious Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship to pursue an MA course in Painting at the English capital’s Royal College of Art.
Though he graduated only this year, the artist already enjoys achievements in the creative field. His works have been exhibited in England and abroad, including cities like London, Amsterdam, and Zurich. Most recently, Okonta was announced the winner of the international 2025 Visual Art Open prize in the Painting, Mixed Media, and Print category for his piece A 9JA Delta Speculative Future (We No Go Wear Hoodie for House).
