Luke Agada: To Translate is to Move Across

Luke Agada To Translate is to Move Across

Luke Agada

To Translate is to Move Across

Monique Meloche Gallery

September 20 - November 1, 2025

Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Brice Arsène Yonkeu Photographed by Bob. Designed by Julia Marks

This catalogue was published on the occasion of To Translate is to Move Across, a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker

moniquemeloche is pleased to present To Translate is to Move Across, a solo exhibition of new works by Lagos-born Luke Agada. Agada’s work investigates the forces of globalization, migration, and cultural dislocation, situating them within a postcolonial context to explore how they shape the emergence of new cultural forms. Heavily inspired by the writings of Homi Bhabha and his concept of the “third space”–a psychological realm of cultural hybridity and negotiation where identities are not fixed but constantly changing–Agada’s surrealist paintings hover between form and fluidity. The Bhabhaian concept states that individuals in the third space constantly navigate between different cultural influences and adapt their identities to their new environment–something alto familiar to Agada who emigrated to the US in 2021 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for his MFA. Agada, who now resides in Chicago, contends with how home has come to mean more than one place. For the artist’s first full solo exhibition with the gallery since graduating in 2023, the works in To Translate is to Move Across articulate a vision of movement that defies rigid categorization, exposing the hybrid, unstable, and fluid nature of meaning and belonging.

Agada’s paintings inhabit the in-between, rendering translation as both subject and practice. His compositions draw from abstract expressionism and surrealism; his color palettes blend the sun scorched tones of his native landscape with the rich color palettes of the Old Masters and Baroque painters; his forms materialize memory, imagination, and observed reality. Yet, as a whole, they align not to one source or fidelity, but rather encompass a visual form of displacement, where elements migrate, meanings shift, and identities fracture and recombine. However, translation is not seamless. It is uneven, unstable, and often ruptured. Agada examines these occurrences through his process by in which texture and surface tension straddle representation and spatial ambiguity. Paint is layered–sometimes with dry brush application–shifted, removed, and reworked revealing earlier strata. But while the artist invites spontaneous influence and unexpected forms, he ultimately retains a sensitive control over the compositions–a delicate struggle between figurative elements and abstraction.

As an extension of Agada’s painting practice, a series of new charcoal drawings on canvas offers a quieter, more intimate counterpoint. Stripped of color and painterly texture, Agada’s drawings trace elusive, interconnected lines that resemble neural pathways, visualizing a more internal, psychological terrain and are perhaps the core structures that underpin his exploration of identity in flux.

In a time marked by escalating cultural and political fragmentation, Luke Agada’s work invites thoughtful engagement with the politics of shared spaces–those fraught, often contested zones shaped by histories of movement, displacement, and transformation. Here, Agada frames translation not as a neat resolution, but as survival, adaptation, and reimagination. To Translate is to Move Across asks us to linger in ambiguity, not to resolve it, and to consider how art becomes a means not of closure, but of continual negotiation.

WHEN EXISTENCE BECOMES FORM

By Brice Arsène Yonkeu

The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Dream Count”1

Every painter is in the history of painting. What makes a given painter interesting, one of the things that gives a painter a chance to be interesting, is his or her sense of where he or she sits in the lineage.

— Teju Cole, “Shadow Cabinet”2

For some time now, I have found myself questioning the purpose I serve in this world and, more broadly, the mission of my generation. To be Black in the twenty-first century is to live each day as the embodiment of one of our ancestors’ most fervent aspirations: physical freedom. This present reality is not given but inherited, it is the result of liberation movements that shaped the last century, from the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to Pan-Africanism and the Civil Rights Movement. Their political mobilizations, literary and artistic productions, and intellectual discourses remain foundations through which our humanity continues to be negotiated.

I was born in Cameroon, yet when I relocated to France in my teenage years, I often felt that my belonging to the world was both limited and misunderstood. More recently, I have come to see Luke Agada’s practice as unfolding within the continuum opened by those movements, offering a contemporary visual language shaped by the migrations of Africans in the diaspora—where surrealist sensation converges with abstraction to capture the experience of navigating the world both as a subject of lived reality and as an object of alterity. The new

1 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), 397.

2 Teju Cole, “Shadow Cabinet,” in Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), 14.

body of work presented in Agada’s exhibition To Translate is to Move Across further extends this exploration, situating his practice within ongoing conversations around displacement, belonging, and the fractured possibilities of identity. Although the exhibition also includes charcoal drawings on canvas, I have chosen here to focus exclusively on the oil paintings.

Agada draws from a myriad of sources to shape his practice. Born in Lagos in 1992, he first studied veterinary medicine and worked as a veterinarian in what might be called the first chapter of his adult life, though he was already painting during those years. His move to the United States in 2021, to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, opened a new phase of critical engagement. In Chicago, he encountered more directly the works of abstract artists

Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning, as well as those of surrealist artists Joan Miró and Arshile Gorky, expanding his visual vocabulary and anchoring his explorations within broader lineages of modernist abstraction and surrealism. This transition also prompted him to reckon more deeply with displacement and global discourses on identity. To stand before Luke Agada’s paintings is to surrender to an act of immersion. Compound Consciousness, for instance, does not permit distraction; it summons the viewer wholly, carrying one into a psychological terrain where sensation eclipses certainty. The first encounter is arresting—an immediate wonder, as if one were enclosed in a moment of melody and swell, where forms and shapes do not stand still but breathe, merging and unfurling in defiance of formal lines, embodying several states and symbols at once. The earthy color palette, at once luminous and haunting, summons fragments of memory—those lingering impressions that hover between the conscious and the forgotten—stirring a turbulent nostalgia that is as personal as it is universal. Agada renders across the whole body of work an existential and deeply psychological experience—his own articulation of what Homi Bhabha has called the “third space,” a realm of cultural hybridity.

His readings range widely, from the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon3, and Homi Bhabha4, alongside contemporary novelists like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Yet, it was a recent reading from a book gifted to him by a friend, that came to define the spirit of this exhibition: a line from Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle5 —“to translate is to move across”—which he embraced as its title. Discussing the title with him, he explained: “While reading The Fateful Triangle, I saw that Hall’s semiotic approach suggests that meaning is never transparent; it requires constant negotiation through signs, language, and cultural codes. Translation is not neutral—it always involves movement, change, and negotiation. Hence, to translate is to move across systems of meaning, re-contextualizing ideas between cultures and languages.”

The choice of title for this exhibition feels precise and coherent, encapsulating the gestural intensity of Agada’s visual language, which in this new body of work compellingly engages with cultural dissonance and the challenges of acculturation.

3 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

4 Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

5 Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Edited by Kobena Mercer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 2017.

y in pop culture and the contradictory casting of ethnically ambiguous roles in film. This scene recalls a millennial girlhood shaped by the pressure to code-switch, long before we had a name for it.

Mayorga’s paintings often speak to one another, returning to familiar scenes with new focus. In W3 R TIR3D, the viewer is placed inside the blue car that once appeared in the distance, circling the birthday party in She’s in the cake / Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret. Here, the composition becomes fractured and cinematic, resisting a fixed perspective. Monarch butterflies—migratory creatures who, unlike humans, cross borders without restriction, surveillance, or fear—drift above the pink wall and into the blue sky in opulent freedom. Inside the cars, the figures appear in varying states of motion: some in protest, others enjoying moments of tenderness and retreat. “We are tired”—a sentiment that reverberates across Latinx communities—voices collective exhaustion shaped by years of xenophobia, advocacy, and survival. Mayorga names what is so often held in.

The accumulation and collision of these personal, professional, philosophical and art-historical sources have given rise to the Baconesque capsules emblematic of his style, exemplified here by The Song and Dance After Crossing. At the center of the composition, two distorted figures are entangled in a dance that suggests both celebration and exhaustion. The painting evokes the joy of arrival, inseparable from the ache of departure and the memory of the journey that made it possible. The couple’s posture—the tilt of their bodies, the outward sweep of their legs—makes their movement unmistakable, even as the absence of bodily details renders them anonymous, capturing a fleeting moment and the reconstitution of a ritual in unfamiliar terrain. As in much of Agada’s work, the figures carry an organic, almost biological quality, shaped by gestures that seem to have been achieved intui-

tively with bristle brushes. This painterly approach breaks down structural frameworks and heightens the surrealist sensation, situating the viewer within a scene that is at once familiar and estranged.

The challenges of acculturation find particular expression in Borderlands Mediation, where a formal line cuts through the center of the canvas, reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s early twentieth-century landscapes such as Study for the Blue Apple Tree (1908) and The Red Tree (Evening) (1908–10). By creating two temporalities, the painting recontextualizes W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” translating it into the dual perception of existence divided between an identity forged in the homeland and another negotiated in a new home.

If W3 R TIR3D maps the emotional landscape of collective fatigue, PU$$H PU$$H THRU and Hot and Ready offer spaces of self-fashioning and healing. Set within stylized Chicago beauty parlors, these paintings portray storefronts of the past and present, transforming them into portals of care and transformation. Here, Mayorga’s beloved figures receive fabulous hairdos and get their nails done. Mirrors draw us in, folding the viewer into the scene. As with much of her work, perspective remains fluid—we may be passing by, stepping through a gilded door, or already inside, reflected back at ourselves. These salons become sites of personal ritual, where care is both aesthetic and emotional—acts of intimate self-love from an artist whose practice carries the weight of visibility and representation.

With this exhibition, Mayorga turns inward to move outward, offering a suite of works that are fantastical, tender, and ever-unfolding. Together, they form a love letter to the places that have shaped her—both as a woman and as an artist. They also stand as a testament to the strength it takes to persist, and to push through, in a world that demands so much of women of color, especially those who choose to lead with vulnerability. Mayorga doesn’t simply depict care—she practices it, inviting us to join her in moments of radical tenderness, sensory pleasure, and communal healing.

Agada, Borderlands Mediation, 2025

Beyond this internal duality, displacement also carries with it a sense of cultural dissonance, which the artist renders as a loss of form and meaning in Entropy and the Lost Form. The work directly references Jacques Derrida’s 1980 essay La Tour de Babel6, where the scattering of tongues is less a curse than the very condition of language itself: a state of perpetual incompletion and excess. In this light, Agada’s contorted figure speaks not only to dissonance but to the generative potential of rupture—the possibility that from broken forms new vocabularies of existence might emerge.

In Agada’s work, I recognize questions that have long haunted my own reflection—on belonging, displacement, and the unfinished pursuit of freedom. Yet beyond this, his paintings gesture toward another form of liberation: a mental and existential freedom that embraces contradiction as a site of becoming. For a generation still seeking to reconcile inherited histories with contemporary existence, his work offers a visual language of possibility: one that affirms our right not only to move across worlds but to belong fully within them. Agada stands among the few artists of our time whose practice captures the vibrations of the present with an intensity that aligns with the literary voices of the Global South, articulating our shared condition while inscribing new ways of seeing it.

Installation Views

Artworks

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in 43.8 x 103.5 cm

(MFL), 2025 charcoal on canvas mounted on wood panel

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in 43.8 x 103.5 cm

(KEG), 2025 charcoal on canvas mounted on wood panel

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in 43.8 x 103.5 cm

84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

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Luke Agada’s practice examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world and its impact on neo-cultural evolution. Agada’s surrealist paintings of disembodied figures and dream-like grounds reference identity and the transformation of the postmodern human, where both time and space produce complex bodies of difference. Overlapping the past and present, the other and the self-reflect the ambiguity of our identity within post-structuralist theory. Agada’s work has been inspired by the postcolonial writings of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and literary works by Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His work is a continuous reflection of his investigative approach to history and critical theory with regards to the examination of the culture of dominance through globalization.

Agada (b.1992, Lagos, Nigeria) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) and a DVM at Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (2018). He has had national and international exhibitions with Gagosian, NYC (2025); Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2024); African American Museum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA (2024); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2025; 2023); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2023); African Artist’s Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria (2021); and Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana.

He has been a recipient of various awards and fellowships including Newcity’s Breakout Artist (2024); Studios at MASS MoCA Fellowship (2023); The James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Award (2023); Dean’s Grant, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2023); Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at The Art Students League of New York (2022); The Helen Frankenthaler Award at SAIC in (2022); George and Ann Siegel Award, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2021); and Global Warming International Art Prize, New York, New York (2020). Agada currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Brice Arsène Yonkeu is a French-Cameroonian independent curator and co-founder of Bwo Art Gallery in Douala, Cameroon. His work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and spatial politics within contemporary African and diasporic contexts. Grounded in storytelling and research, his curatorial approach foregrounds emerging visual languages, introspective narratives, and underexamined histories, crafting exhibitions that are at once poetic, political, and deeply affective.

Over the past few years, Yonkeu has curated critically engaged exhibitions in the United States, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, France, and Italy. His practice bridges geographies and sensibilities—rooted in rewriting art historical narratives from the South, while remaining globally attuned to diverse cultural dialogues. Known for his ability to create thoughtful contexts around artists’ work, he has helped introduce a new generation of artists to international audiences and institutions.

Notable recent projects include Ever So Present II: Between Home and Elsewhere (Gagosian, New York, June 2025) featuring Amoako Boafo, Emma Prempeh, Luke Agada and Josèfa Ntjam; Ever So Present (dot.ateliers, Accra, 2024-25), the culmination of a curatorial and artistic residency, this group exhibition brought together six artists reflecting on temporary dislocation, intuitive making, and embodied research; Where Dreams Are Born and Peace Restored (Bwo Art Gallery, Douala, 2024), featuring Emma Prempeh, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, and Araba Opoku, this exhibition transformed the gallery into an introspective landscape, exploring the desire for inner refuge and the restorative power of dreaming; and Still I Rise (Google France, Paris, 2022), which celebrated Black self-fashioning and resilience. His work has been featured in Artsy, ARTnews, Artnet, and Contemporary And.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in African Studies and Political Science, and a Master’s in Economic Law from Sciences Po Paris.

Exhibition Checklist

Doors, 2025 oil on canvas

72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Synapses No. 25, 2025 charcoal on canvas

27 x 23 in 68.6 x 58.4 cm

Synapses No. 26, 2025 charcoal on canvas

27 x 23 in 68.6 x 58.4 cm

Othered Vignette, 2025 oil on canvas

48 x 48 in 121.9 x 121.9 vm

The Song and Dance After Crossing, 2025 oil on canvas

72 x 60 in

182.9 x 152.4 cm

Transfiguration (White Tulips), 2025 charcoal on canvas mounted on wood panel

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in 43.8 x 103.5 cm

Transfiguration (MFL), 2025 charcoal on canvas mounted on panel

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in 43.8 x 103.5 cm

Transfiguration (Keg), 2025 charcoal on canvas mounted on wood panel

17 1/4 x 40 3/4 in

43.8 x 103.5 cm

Entropy and the Lost Form, 2025 oil on canvas

72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Borderlands Mediation, 2025 oil on canvas

72 x 72 in 182.9 x 182.9 cm

The Green Room (Dream Sellers), 2025 oil on canvas

72 x 72 in 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Compound Consciousness, 2025 oil on canvas

84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com