By Akintayo Abodunrin
Rita Okolie’s presentation in the exhibition My World, My View offers a deeply reflective photographic exploration of the relationship between place, labour, and lived experience. Shown as part of Fringe Arts Bath’s 2026 contemporary visual arts programme at Newark Works in Bath, England, the exhibition opened with a private view on May 22 and ran until June 6, 2026.
Under the curatorial theme Connecting the World, the showcase invited artists and community members to consider how personal landscapes; from quiet streets and domestic corners to the raw energy of entire cities, might form a collective portrait of a shared human experience.
The exhibition statement framed the show as a deliberate response to “an age of digital noise,” proposing a timely return to what is local, real, and immediate. It invited viewers to step into a vibrant space where individual perspectives, shaped by vastly different geographies and realities, could create an emotional bridge across the globe.
This framing was central to the exhibition’s power. The works on display offered intimate glimpses of ordinary life across different corners of the world: a single window, a quiet street, a neighbourhood view, the kinetic movement of a city, and the undeniable presence of people within familiar environments.
Within this wider context, Okolie’s contribution stood out for the way it treated the ordinary as something neither small nor incidental.
Her works did not approach Lagos as a distant, exotic spectacle, but as a lived environment shaped by work, movement, memory, and social rhythm.
In The Fruit Vendor, the figure of the vendor is not simply inserted into the image as a passive marker of street life. Instead, she becomes the emotional centre of the work—a figure through whom labour, nourishment, endurance, and economic survival are made starkly visible.
The photograph belongs to a long visual tradition in which women in markets, streets, and informal economies are used to explore the relationship between the human body and the urban landscape.
However, Okolie’s approach carefully avoids theatricality or cheap sentiment. The subject is not overburdened with forced symbolism. Instead, the image allows the quiet force of her presence to gather meaning gradually.
The visual cues are apparent and deliberate. Fruit, colour, gesture, and public space are organized into a dignified visual language of work.
The vendor’s body exists in close relation to the goods around her, but she is never absorbed or erased by them; she holds the entire frame together.
What might otherwise be dismissed as a familiar, everyday urban scene becomes, through Okolie’s framing, a profound meditation on the women whose unseen daily labour sustains the social and economic life of the city. In this sense, The Fruit Vendor speaks directly to the exhibition’s interest in the “local and real,” reminding us that ordinary spaces are often where the most complex human stories are held.
If The Fruit Vendor moves through intimacy, the second photograph, Lagos, opens into scale. Here, the city is not presented as a neutral backdrop but as a living, breathing structure of movement, density, and atmosphere.
Lagos appears as a place continually made and remade through human activity defined by traffic, trade, architecture, the patience of waiting, and constant adaptation. Okolie’s view of the city is clear-eyed and unsentimental.
There is immense energy in the image, but there is also undeniable pressure. The city’s vitality is inseparable from its congestion and the heavy demands it places on its inhabitants. This tension gives the work its critical weight.
Seen together, the two photographs establish a productive dialogue between the individual and the collective. The Fruit Vendor gives the viewer a human point of entry, while Lagos expands that human presence into the wider, sprawling urban field. One image asks us to look closely at the dignity of a single figure, while the other asks us to consider the massive environment that shapes such lives. This interplay between person and place is where Okolie’s work is strongest. She understands that a city is not merely its roads, buildings, or skyline, but the accumulation of ordinary human gestures repeated daily.
Within My World, My View, Okolie’s photographs also gained deeper resonance through their strategic placement alongside other international works. The wider presentation brought together images of windows, streets, and domestic spaces from entirely different cultures, forming what the curators described as a heartwarming bridge across the globe. In that context, Okolie’s Lagos did not appear as an isolated or foreign anomaly. Rather, it became part of a broader universal conversation about how people recognize themselves through the places they inhabit. Her work suggests that the local, when carefully observed, can become a shared global language.
What conveys this sense of connection is Okolie’s commendable artistic restraint. She does not force artificial drama onto the lens. Her photographs rely instead on sustained attention to colour, movement, structure, and the emotional charge of public life. This gives the works a subtle but persuasive authority. They are accessible without being simplistic, and culturally specific without becoming closed off to outside viewers. They invite recognition rather than requiring explanation.
Where the presentation might have been strengthened, however, is in scale and expansion. With only two works on display, the viewer is given a compelling glimpse into Okolie’s visual world, but not yet the full breadth of her artistic thinking. The Fruit Vendor and Lagos clearly belong to a much larger, ongoing conversation about women, work, public space, and urban identity. A larger sequence of images would have allowed the relationship between the figure, the street, and the city to unfold with greater complexity. Even so, the compactness of this presentation gives the two images a concentrated force. They function effectively as paired propositions: the city as a lived environment, and labour as one of its most visible human forms.
Okolie’s contribution to Fringe Arts Bath 2026 was therefore not simply a presentation of Nigerian urban life within an international gallery setting. It was a careful act of cultural translation. Through The Fruit Vendor and Lagos, she brought the distinct textures of one specific place into dialogue with viewers elsewhere, without flattening or compromising the identity of that place. Her photographs show that the ordinary is never merely ordinary; it carries memory, economic realities, beauty, and struggle. In Okolie’s work, a vendor and a city become more than mere subjects, they become vital ways of thinking about how people endure, belong, and make meaning within the world they occupy.
As a professional appearance within a curated group exhibition, Okolie’s presentation demonstrated both artistic maturity and conceptual clarity. Her works aligned closely with the exhibition’s broader themes while retaining a distinct, independent visual voice.
In My World, My View, she offered a vision of Lagos that was intimate, observant, and critically aware, a world deeply rooted in local experience, yet open to the shared human concerns that connect viewers across any distance.
