Nine African artists turn digital art into a space of transit where the past changes shape to re-enter the present and imagine new futures.
RITUALS OF TIME
LOAD GALLERY
BARCELONA
16 SEPTEMBER 2026 - 16 JANUARY 2027
Michael Aboya | Àsìkò | John Baloy | Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba | Delphine Diallo | Nana Frimpong Oduro | Osinachi | Melissa Simon-Hartman | Abdulrahman Adesola Yusuf
Delphine Diallo
The past does not always stay in the past. Sometimes it returns as an image, a gesture, a body, a fragment, a signal. It can reappear through a face, a ritual, a piece of cloth, a digital trace, or a memory that refuses to disappear. In Rituals of Time, nine African artists explore digital art as a space where memory is not preserved in silence, but reactivated through transformation.
At Load Gallery, photography, AI, collage, moving image and digital composition become languages through which ancestral knowledge, personal histories and future visions can meet. The exhibition moves across bodies, spiritual systems, landscapes, domestic interiors, submerged worlds and speculative futures, asking how images can carry what has been interrupted, inherited or forgotten.
Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba
Curatorial Essay
by Saiba Bayo
Rituals of Time brings together the works of nine African artists who explore notions of epoch and duration, alongside memory, nostalgia, and longing. It unfolds around the central idea that time is not linear but moves in spirals and returns, following a rhythm of birth, death and renewal that reverberates through bodies and spirits. In the exhibition, the artworks emerge as a fluid, generative force, reimagining and reinterpreting the world beyond temporal constraints. Epochs fold into cycles that unfold according to their own durations, challenging the Western conception of time as continuous progression and memory as linear preservation.
The exhibition echoes the Mbari tradition of the Owerri-Igbo communities of southeastern Nigeria, a communal artistic practice rooted in ancestral ritual that serves to remember the past, recreate reality and imagine a better future. As Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe observed, the House of Mbari embodies an aesthetic of process rather than result, ensuring that each generation receives its own impulse and movement of creation. In the Load Gallery, where images flicker into being and vanish, this same impermanence is refracted through the screen, transforming it into a threshold between what has been, what is, and what may become. Ancestral heritages and knowledge are witnessed and released, while spiritual forces manifest in forms that capture their attributes, whether carved in moving images or rendered in pixels.
“Nostalgia ceases to be a ‘looking back’ and transforms into a ‘reaching forward’.”
Saiba Bayo
Michael Aboya
This notion of time and memory resonates with Kenyan philosopher John S. Mbiti’s reflections. For Mbiti time is a compilation of events unfolding through two durations: the recent past alongside the present, and the remote past.
Memory is the thread that binds these dimensions, keeping the “living-dead” present for generations before they fade into collective memory. In Michael Aboya’s Echoes of Time, images become portals where time folds back upon itself, thus exploring the emotional and spiritual intersections of humanity, nature, and time. Similarly, in At the Seams, Spilling Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba’s collage practice assembles and recomposes fragments, allowing past, present and speculative futures to coexist.
Nana Frimpong Oduro
This artistic expression of Yoruba cosmogony finds its material counterpart in Ancestral Frequency, a sculptural costume created by Melissa Simon-Hartman in dialogue with Àsìkò’s work. Made from hand-woven fibres, reclaimed textiles, shells, beads and integrated lighting elements, the work draws on the visual language of Egúngún while reinterpreting it through contemporary collaboration. As a physical presence, Ancestral Frequency is a garment for a body that bridges epochs, a wearable archive of longing, and a testament to the enduring duration of the ancestral within the span of a single life.
Notions of nostalgia and longing are central to this exhibition. As reflected in Nana Frimpong Oduro’s work, these elements, shaped by time, are understood not as passive states of looking backward, but as active forces that pull the past into the present and reach toward the future. Through a dense constellation of figures, his introspection opens a dialogue between different forces of nature. Here, water, earth, fire and air are explored as agents for bodily experience and ritual transformation, and for the artist’s inner consciousness as a vessel for a higher power. Delphine Diallo, in her Motherverse project, imagines a submerged realm of memory where ancient knowledge and future technology converge, while Abdulrahman Adesola Yusuf redraws symbols from the public domain as though “playing Tetris” to trace the spiritual weight of personal moments and economic pressures.
Osinachi
John Baloy
As embodied in the Mbari tradition of creative renewal, the body emerges in Rituals of Time as a central site where time, memory and longing converge. In John Baloy’s photographs, the body carries history, resilience and continuity, becoming a site of transmission across time. Osinachi approaches embodiment through a distinctly digital language, pushing the boundaries of Microsoft Word’s vector tools to construct domestic interiors and Afrofuturist visions where pixelated digital fills represent Black skin and turn everyday patterns into explorations of vulnerability.
“AI isn’t replacing tradition; it gives me a visual language to ask questions about what has been forgotten, interrupted or hidden”
Àsìkò
Melissa Simon-Hartman
What might otherwise disappear is not preserved unchanged, but remade into a form capable of inhabiting the present.
Newly commissioned by Load Gallery, Ancestral Frequency is a wearable sculpture by Melissa Simon-Hartman, developed in creative dialogue with Àsìkò ’s What Was Lost Between Worlds.
Conceived as a material response to this dialogue, the work gives form to one of the central propositions of Rituals of Time: memory survives not by remaining intact, but by moving between bodies, places and materials, assuming new forms as it travels.
The work engages with the visual and ancestral language of Egúngún without seeking to reconstruct the ritual or reproduce a traditional masquerade. Instead, Simon-Hartman rearticulates this language through a contemporary vocabulary of material, craftsmanship and light.
The past is neither copied nor reduced to ornament. It is carried forward through transformation, each material retaining a trace of what came before while entering into a new relationship with the present.
Suspended so that it appears to hover just above the floor, a veiled figure emerges from layers of hand-woven fibres, reclaimed textiles, shells, beads and threads of warm light. Its silhouette unmistakably evokes a body, yet no body is revealed. Neither simply a garment nor a theatrical prop, Ancestral Frequency occupies an indeterminate space between wearable sculpture, vessel and apparition.
Here, memory acquires weight, texture and physical presence.
Abdulrahman Adesola Yusuf
