Johannesburg

STEVENSON is pleased to present Ungrounded: Nothing to Hold, a solo exhibition by Tofo Bardi.

For her first exhibition in South Africa, Bardi presents a series of paintings and ceramics that represent interests branched between psychoanalysis and Yoruba (Olukumi) cosmologies stemming from her own direct ancestry. The title references existential thought outlined by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre in their concept of ‘the Nothing’ as it relates to the human experience – alluding to how we find meaning and self in existence amidst dread and anxiety. Bardi contends with the fractured relationship between what she refers to as the 'disturbed mind and disturbed spirit', embodied in ghostly figures intertwined on landscapes of blue and red.

Bardi revolves her practice around the 'uncanny' – a term coined by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch to describe the 'intellectual uncertainty and ambiguity of an event or feeling which is unsettling yet familiar.' However, the artist reimagines this phenomenon through the lens of Yoruba beliefs. In Yoruba, an 'ẹmí' refers to the spirit or consciousness of a person. Bardi iterates how spirits are colloquially understood as white figures, which are vaguely human. In her paintings, the 'ẹmí' are depicted as a mass of mouthless conjoined bodies with flowing black hair, hovering on the border of human, spirit and ghost. The artist paints them in bodies of water, to convey the unnerving 'feeling of sinking'.

In previous exhibitions, an emphasis was placed on these figures and their role in representing feelings of anxiety and energy. In Ungrounded: Nothing to Hold, Bardi continues to depict these beings while highlighting the importance of the abstract spaces they inhabit, translated through a palette of red and blue. Through her use of blue, the artist channels the Yoruba philosophy of Itutu, which describes the ‘aesthetics of cool’ – specifically the ability for people and objects to emit a sense of composure and grace.

The artist writes:

These spaces and objects also become containers that store a part of the emotion. They are not passive; they serve as artifacts that carry fragments and energies of self, shaped by our encounters with them.

For this body of work, Bardi introduces screen-printing into the landscapes. Through the process of bitmapping, which takes a digital image and translates this into a mass of pixels (tiny dots), the image is rendered in a new form. Bardi bitmaps unspecified locations and objects (a house, a window) in her paintings and subsequently screen-prints this new image onto the canvas. This layering and introduction of texture illuminates the nuance and personality of the landscape. For the artist, moving across mediums proposes these environments as witnesses that absorb and echo. The artist concludes:

I reflect on these exchanges between the external environment and the self and encounters that refuse resolution, where objects breathe, spaces become us, and the unseen comes forward.

Bardi was born in 2001 in Benin City, Nigeria, and lives in Lagos. She has a BA Fine Art from the University of Benin, where she specialized in painting.

Dissonance and Disturbance, her first solo exhibition, took place at kó gallery in Lagos, in June 2025. Group exhibitions include Optics, kó gallery, Lagos (2023); Young Contemporaries, Rele Arts Foundation, Lagos (2023); and Conversations, Nosa Creatives, Online (2020).

The exhibition opens on Saturday 15 November, 10am to 1pm