ALMA PEARLArtists
Exhibitions
Fairs
Publications
News 
Contact 

In Diversions, the series of prints presented at Alma Pearl, Unyimeabasi Udoh draws on the experience of moving through the city to capture the fleeting semantic textures of everyday urban life. Street fragments, words, and peripheral details become points of attention within a constantly shifting visual environment.

The series belongs to a vein of contemporary visual culture that finds the billboard a site for artistic exploration. These works owe less to pop connotations enacted by those associated with the Nouveau réalisme such as Mimmo Rotella or Raymond Hains and more to the conceptual turn associated with artists akin to Barbara Kruger or Félix González-Torres. More specifically, the series aligns with a broader lineage of “photographs of photographs,” recalling works such as Luigi Ghirri’s Cardboard Landscapes.

For Ghirri, the unnoticed interstices of the urban environment formed a contemporary fresco, comparable to the mural cycles once embedded within churches and civic architecture. These marginal and transient images become documents of their time, preserving the visual atmosphere of everyday life. In a similar way, Udoh’s series moves between the sacred and the everyday. If in other works the artist references religious iconography or pagan female goddesses, here the ordinary urban details of Diversions begin to assume the status of fragmented icons.


Billboards themselves remain emblematic of the modern urban condition, embodying mobility, consumer culture, and the incessant circulation of images through public space. Within Udoh’s practice, however, the found image, the ‘photograph of a photograph’, goes through another layer of transmutation or indeed ‘translation’: from the digital image to an analogue screenprint.




Return to the exhibition page