TOFO BARDI

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The practice of Nigerian contemporary artist Tofo Bardi (b. 2001, Benin City, Nigeria), represents interests branched between psychoanalysis and Yoruba (Olukumi) cosmologies stemming from her own direct ancestry. Referencing existential thought outlined by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre in their concept of ‘the Nothing’ as it relates to the human experience, Bardi considers how we find meaning and self in existence amidst dread and anxiety. Her practice contends with the fractured relationship between what she refers to as the ‘disturbed mind and disturbed spirit’, embodied in ghostly figures intertwined across landscapes of blue and red.

Drawing inspiration from the liminal space of the human mind and the innate fear of the unknown, Bardi focuses on states of altered consciousness, rites of passage and the representation of the intangible, blurring the boundaries between reality and the imaginary. Her practice is informed by personal experiences with fear and loss. Ghost-like figures take centre stage in her paintings, spectral entities that symbolise the intricate tapestry of human consciousness and the imagined beings that reside within the depths of every individual’s mind. These ethereal figures interact and engage with one another, inhabiting a realm entirely their own.

In Echoes of the Voice Only I Can Hear (2025), Bardi’s ghost-like figures emerge and dissolve into one another, occupying an ambiguous space between the psychological and the imagined. Their overlapping, almost indistinguishable forms evoke the complexity of the human mind, where fear, memory and loss coexist with what cannot be fully understood or articulated. The work reflects Bardi’s broader interest in altered states of consciousness and the intangible, giving visual form to the unseen figures that inhabit the interior world.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Bardi is a graduate of the University of Benin, specialising in painting, and currently lives and works in Lagos. Her work has been featured in exhibitions including Conversations by Nosa Creatives (2020) and Young Contemporaries by Rele Arts Foundation (2023). Dissonance and Disturbance, her first solo exhibition, took place at kó gallery in Lagos in June 2025. Group exhibitions include Optics, kó gallery, Lagos (2023); Young Contemporaries, Rele Arts Foundation, Lagos (2023); and Conversations, Nosa Creatives, Online (2020).

Central to Bardi’s practice is the ‘uncanny’ – a term coined by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch to describe the ‘intellectual uncertainty and ambiguity of an event or feeling which is unsettling yet familiar.’ Bardi, however, reimagines this phenomenon through the lens of Yoruba beliefs. In Yoruba, an ‘ẹmí’ refers to the spirit or consciousness of a person. Bardi iterates how spirits are colloquially understood as white figures that are vaguely human. In her paintings, the ‘ẹmí’ are depicted as a mass of mouthless, conjoined bodies with flowing black hair, hovering on the border between human, spirit and ghost. The artist paints them in bodies of water to convey the unnerving ‘feeling of sinking’.

Through this convergence of psychoanalysis, existential thought and Yoruba cosmology, Bardi’s practice examines the uncertain territories between mind and spirit, reality and imagination, and the familiar and unknown. Her spectral figures give physical form to otherwise intangible states of consciousness, fear and loss, creating unsettling yet recognisable worlds in which the psychological and spiritual coexist.