David Alekhuogie

Yancey Richardson is proud to present highlifetime, an exhibition of new work by David Alekhuogie, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together work from his series A Reprise—including layered, wall-mounted works that combine photographs, collage and sculpture—Alekhuogie continues his exploration of how narrative and authorship are embedded in Western presentations of African art while reflecting on how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued and interpreted today. Coinciding with the exhibition will be the release of Alekhuogie’s new monograph titled A Reprise, published by Aperture. The exhibition will be on view from September 2 through October 18, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 11 from 6–8PM.

Reflecting his understanding of the relationship between modernity and colonialism, Alekhuogie sees photography as a site where complex historical processes unfold and where the consequences of those processes continue to be seen. In his works, he critiques the underlying structures of western appropriation and classification that shape the collective understanding of images, often through his own acts of appropriation whereby source material is rephotographed, reimagined and remade.

Alekhuogie’s series A Reprise is the result of his engagement with the photographs Walker Evans made while on commission from the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1935 of African sculptures included in the exhibition African Negro Art. These photographs were revisited in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020, that reexamined the tightly cropped and formally inventive images Evans made.

Alekhuogie’s encounter with this exhibition and the images Evans made sixty-five years prior provided the basis for considering how Black aesthetics and cultural objects have been altered—if not altogether changed—by their exhibition in western institutions and subsequent documentation by photographers such as Evans. In highlifetime, Alekhuogie investigates these images of African sculpture by remixing them into vibrant and multilayered collages which attempt to reanimate historical objects after their original capture.

To make these works, Alekhuogie transposes facsimiles of masterpieces of African art onto paper structures of his own making, before then rephotographing these image-sculptures, regularly using East and West African textiles as backdrops to create dynamic juxtapositions of space and form. The spatial interpretation of the original sculptures via Evans’ photographs is intensified by Alekhuogie’s layering of two or more framed photographs into new sculptural constructions. Through his own transmutation of these images, Alekhuogie brings what he calls the “hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism” to the foreground and questions through whose eyes and whose agency African Americans form their cultural narrative.