Some visual artists possess a rare gift of the ability to gently disarm collectors, devoted admirers, and curious art enthusiasts alike, guiding them often through the immediacy of social media and into those carefully curated moments of their creative odyssey. With each post, image, or reflection, they transport you precisely where they want you to be, inviting you to see, feel, and remember alongside them.

Hassan Aliyu stands firmly within this royal cast of storytellers and artists who understand that art does not end in the studio or on the gallery wall, but lives on in shared memory and digital presence.

Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs credit: Dr. Hassan Aliyu

British born visual artist of Nigerian parentage, curator and culture ambassador, Dr. Hassan Aliyu takes us gently but boldly back to where it all began. In a reflective Facebook post, the United Kingdom based artist opens a visual scrapbook of his early 20s, charting the raw energy, collaborations, and audacious confidence that shaped his formative years.

From his 1992 exhibition at 198 Gallery, to the socially engaged works produced through Norwood Art House, a community art project he co-founded with the great sculptor Raymond Watson, Aliyu recalls a period when art refused to stay confined within studio walls.

These were years when creativity spilled deliberately into public spaces, culminating in landmark projects such as the Grangewood Park mosaic (1997), created in collaboration with Salome Smeaton-Russell.

Yet not done, the images also trace his studio experiments, fresh-off-the-plane London paintings, and cover artworks for the Heinemann African Writers Series, signalling an artist already in conversation with literature, place, and global Black thought. Very nostalgic from a great fan Nigerian Juju music maestro, Chief Ebenezer Obey. The legend musical compositions have been part of his journey from the onset.

Readers of iBAND Magazine will recognise familiar themes in this nostalgic recollection. In previous interviews with iBAND, the famed Dr. Aliyu who has been globetrotting the world with his art and also leading the art society for Nigerians and black people in the United Kingdom, has consistently spoken about process over polish, stressing that his early years were driven by curiosity, urgency, and a need to make work that lived in the world, not just on walls. Those interviews revealed an artist deeply committed to art as dialogue with communities and history.

He has often reflected on how collaboration shaped his thinking, describing it as both a creative strategy and a political act. His recollections of Norwood Art House echo what he told iBAND; that working with communities was not an outreach, but a co-authorship, a way of breaking down hierarchies between artist and audience.

Aliyu who has been critical of how exhibiting artists choke the walls with no art direction which is a vital part of exhibitions, also told iBAND that confidence, sometimes mistaken for bravado was essential for survival as a young Black artist navigating institutions in the 1990s.

Looking back now, that “brash 25-year-old” becomes a symbolic figure in his narrative as a sign for fearless, ready for experimentation and unafraid to take up space.

iBAND Magazine, Celebrating Visual Arts from the Original.
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