Esiri Erheriene-Essi in When We See Us
We are happy to announce that the new exhibition When We See Us at Bozar in Brussels features work by Esiri Erheriene-Essi, alongside Eniwaye Oluwaseyi’s work and many other artists.
Running from February 7 to August 10, 2025, the exhibition presents 150 works by 120 artists, spanning from the 1920s to the present day. Curated by Koyo Kouoh, the exhibition celebrates Black joy, resilience, and liberation through six central themes.
‘When I think of When We See Us, I see… black joy. The political power of black happiness. I see black emancipation and the victory over oppression.’ This is how curator Koyo Kouoh – who has been appointed with the specific task of curating the Biennale Arte in 2026 in Venice – summarizes the exhibition in a nutshell. Black joy runs like a common thread through the exhibition, in which paintings are grouped together thematically. It brings you from ‘The Everyday’ to the sections ‘Repose’, ‘Triumph & Emancipation’, ‘Sensuality’ and ‘Spirituality’ to ‘Joy & Revelry’. You rarely see such a large number of people laughing while walking through an exhibition. Joy is infectious.
Esiri Erheriene-Essi, The Birthday Party
The research for When We See Us was conducted during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. From the beginning, it was clear that the focus would be on everyday things that bring joy: cooking, eating, drinking, talking, making music, dancing, having sex, celebrating, enjoying one’s body and that of others, or just doing nothing. ‘Refusing the gaze’: this is how Koyo Kouoh describes it. Because when it comes to people of colour in the 20th and early 21st centuries, the camera all too quickly homes in on violence and pain. In recent years, this has assuredly come from a place of outrage too. Black Lives Matter! So what and who do you see? Above all the legacy with which other continents have saddled Africa, the consequences of slavery, apartheid and colonialism. Koyo Kouoh has found that these dead-end streets are ineffective when it comes to self-representation. Joy is the most effective weapon when it comes to breaking the spell of the outsider’s gaze. ‘Black Art Matters!’ is proudly displayed on Koyo Kouoh’s t-shirt.
‘I want to show the everyday,’ says Esiri Erheriene-Essi, one of the selected artists, ‘not the battle, the suffering or the colonial trauma. I want to show what it means to live in this era, which reveals the black gaze in full.’ For her painting, she started with a photo of Steve Biko, the South African civil rights activist. However, for a brief moment, it strays from politics. In the image, Biko is surrounded by friends, celebrating his niece’s birthday. The joyous occasion is evident, with everyone enjoying themselves. Biko is holding a birthday cake with three burning candles. A group of friends is present, and their happiness is evident. ‘I was struck by the joy on his face and his apparent comfort in the company of his friends. I was inspired to capture this moment in a painting.’
With When We See Us, what primarily springs to mind for Esiri Erheriene Essi is ‘representation’. This is just one of the three large exhibitions on the subject that she has seen in the past decade: about art history, about the black art canon rather than the Euro-American one. As a black female artist from London, she finds this extremely important. As a child, she was unaware of this history, but it will now expand the horizons of future generations. Her advice is to ‘Come and see, and make sure you have a more diverse view of art history. There will always be people and stories that go unnoticed.’
Visit Bozar’s website for more information and tickets for When We See Us:
More InformationABOUT Esiri Erheriene-Essi
Born in 1982 in London, United Kingdom
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Esiri Erheriene-Essi is predominately a painter of mid to large-scale paintings concerned with figuration, history and society. She is captivated by history – in particular, images, objects, and documents which we can return to, in order to examine both individual and shared memories and histories. A large part of her practice entails collecting and creating an archive, which could potentially become incorporated into her work. Archives are important to the artist as they create links and orders that she can question and play with – she searches for the discrepancies, the silences, in order to, through painting, create interruptions and assaults on the canonical historical narrative. With hindsight, bias and curiosity, she takes these discordances and brings them up to the surface. Erheriene-Essi continuously re-edits the narratives with the hope of robbing history of some of its tyrannical power by creating new scenarios. Or rather, she is incessantly attempting to imagine more humane and liberating narratives than what has gone before. In the process she perhaps slightly changes our readings of history and thereby shows how we write the present.
In her work, Erheriene-Essi makes many references to popular culture, because popular culture is profoundly mythic and loaded. The canvases she makes are a theatre of popular desires and fantasies, where we all can discover and play with the process of identification. These ‘theatrical scenes’ show the imagined as well as the underrepresented, not only to the viewer but also to the artist herself. The paintings ‘play’ in their own way – they are telling a story, even though the scenes have no beginning, middle or end – they are cut off mid flow, out of context, are frozen, silent and still. Yet they have ‘sound’ as if they are performing and want to be heard. The audience is continuously invited to watch as well as to try and decipher the haphazard plot in which characters are encased in. The good thing about performing on canvas is that anything is possible – and that is what intrigues Erheriene-Essi the most.
