By Wilfred Okiche
Gabriel Otu’s photographic series, ‘Riders of Resonance’, shown at the Abuja photo exhibition on 25 October 2024 at the ICC Exhibition Pavilion, Abuja, offers a study of cultural inheritance and ceremonial poise through the spectacle of the Kano Durbar.
The works sit within a lineage of pictorial traditions, part ethnographic, part portraiture but Otu’s approach is more aligned with the interpretive, psychologically attentive concerns of contemporary fine-art photography.
His images recall not only the technical discipline of modern African photographers but also the imaginative reach found in the works of Samuel Fosso or Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who imbued their subjects with an interiority that resists simple reading.
The most revealing photographs in Riders of Resonance and perhaps in Otu’s practice so far are those in which his riders appear suspended between the rigor of ritual and the vulnerability of human presence.
In the first image, the veiled horseman in layered green and white presents a figure whose psychology is shielded yet unmistakably alert.
The delicate lace across his face functions not merely as costume but as a visual scrim that complicates our access to him. Much like the strategies of Fosso’s early self-portraits, the concealment invites a meditation on identity what is revealed through masking rather than bare exposure.
The second photograph, with its monumental headpiece and ochre textile arrangement, is Otu at his most compositional.
The rider’s gaze soft, almost weary recalls a long tradition of portraiture in which status and contemplation merge. His posture, deliberately centered, echoes classicist impulses but remains rooted in contemporary Nigerian visual culture.
Otu has spoken before about wanting to “honor the ceremony without romanticizing it,” and here he succeeds: the man’s regalia is rendered with precision, yet the psychological tenor of the portrait resists pomp. The Durbar becomes a stage where dignity is practiced rather than assumed.
Texture carries much of the emotional weight in these photographs. Broad, tactile surfaces, coarse weaves, embroidered panels, horse tack that verges on the ornamental interlock with Otu’s restrained chromatic sensibilities.
His colours are saturated but never indulgent; the reds and greens have the density of history without lapsing into theatricality. This is where his fine-art instincts are most apparent. Otu’s palette carries the murmurs of a cultural archive. It is reminiscent of the muted yet evocative tonalities favored by Kiluanji Kia Henda, whose work transforms tradition into slow-burning visual statements.
Where Otu falters slightly is in his occasional overreliance on ornamental density. The third image, striking as it threatens to drown its rider in a crush of pattern and surface embellishment. Otu’s ambition to foreground textile and craftsmanship occasionally overshadows the psychological dimension he handles so thoughtfully elsewhere. A quieter frame might have deepened our encounter with the subject rather than dispersing our attention across the sumptuous overload of regalia.
Yet, the series holds steady in its broader purpose. By placing his riders, real participants in a centuries-old ceremonial landscape in tightly framed compositions, Otu foregrounds the lived continuity of the Durbar. He avoids the panoramic impulse common in festival photography; instead, he chooses intimacy. The festival becomes less an event than a condition, a place where identity, labour, ancestry, and performance coexist.
Like Owen’s city dwellers finding rest and selfhood in parks, Otu’s horsemen claim their own psychological space amid the grandeur of cultural expectation. In Riders of Resonance, the Durbar is not merely a spectacle but a site of interior life. His riders, stoic yet tenderly rendered, become proof of a tradition that persists not because it is performed, but because it is inhabited.
