In Her Spirit: Eilen Itzel Mena and Jemila Isa
26th March, 2025 to 26th April, 2025
Bolanle Contemporary
The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ
At The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ this spring, the quiet reverberations of ancestral memory and spiritual inquiry take tangible form in In Her Spirit, a luminous and searching duo exhibition from Bolanle Contemporary, featuring works by Eilen Itzel Mena and Jemila Isa. On view from 26 March through 26 April, the exhibition moves with solemn cadence through the ways in which Black women inherit, embody, and refashion spiritual lineages—through ritual, through gesture, through paint and sculpture.
Accompanied by an original sound composition by Avila Santo, the exhibition unfolds less as a static presentation and more as a living altar—where sacred pasts meet personal presents, and where the unseen is summoned through both sight and sound.
© Eilen Itzel Mena
Both Mena and Isa work with the notion of faith as a lived, breathing condition—one shaped by geography, by history, by gendered expectation, and by the persistent call of the divine. For Mena, whose roots stretch into the Ifá tradition and the shimmering pageantry of the Egungun masquerade, spirituality is fluid, kinetic, and intimate. Her canvases pulse with colour and memory, recalling, as she notes, the saturated hues of 1990s Dominican Republic—painted houses that held familial warmth, resistance, and joy in equal measure. “Colour is memory,” she says, and in her work, memory is not passive; it is active, summoned, transmuted.
Photo: Brynley Odu Davies.
The paintings seem almost to breathe—gesture-rich, emotionally unguarded, oscillating between abstraction and invocation. They are not simply aesthetic statements, but acts of spiritual labour—offerings rendered in pigment, portals through which ancestral presences might enter. Echoes of Egungun—where masked bodies whirl with ancestral force—are not merely referenced, but reimagined through Mena’s chromatic intensity and intuitive movement. In resisting linear narrative or rigid form, she also resists erasure. Her canvases become sites of holding: for histories unarchived, for spirits unnamed, for personal truths too expansive for language.
Where Mena’s language is intuitive and fluid, Isa’s is architectural, deliberate. Her paintings and sculptures interrogate the structures—both physical and social—through which Christianity has shaped community life in Nigeria and its diasporic echoes. The White Chapel appears and reappears in her work—not as a monolithic symbol of faith, but as a space of paradox, representing both spiritual refuge and societal constraint.
Courtesy of the artist and Bolanle Contemporary
© Jemila Isa
Her materials speak in quiet declarations. In sculptural works, the street preacher—long a fixture of Nigerian cityscapes—stands at the centre. These women, often dismissed or romanticised, become here figures of profound endurance, delivering their urgent sermons in the midst of traffic, of noise, of daily life. Through Isa’s measured hand, they emerge not as caricatures of zealotry, but as embodiments of authority, bearing faith like armour. “My works,” she writes, “reflect on the profound influence of the Church within African life, and especially on the roles carved out—often rigidly—for women within these systems.”
Photo: Brynley Odu Davies.
Together, Mena and Isa do not smooth over difference, nor do they seek neat conclusions. In Her Spirit holds space for tension—for the pull between obedience and rebellion, doctrine and intuition, past and self-making. The conversation between the two artists is less a harmony than a call-and-response: Mena’s works evoke spiritual ecstasy, Isa’s, spiritual discipline. One is fluid, the other architectural—but both, ultimately, are animated by the same question: how does one carry belief?
Binding these two voices is Santo’s meditative sound piece, a layered composition that drifts through the gallery like incense. It does not direct; it invites. A quiet polyphony of echoes, memories, and imagined ceremonies, it underscores the show’s commitment to a spirituality that is felt, not only seen.
In Her Spirit does not profess to speak for all. Rather, it attends to the particular—two artists, two spiritual vocabularies, two aesthetic grammars—in order to suggest something larger: that faith, like art, is never static. It moves. It returns. It changes form.
In Her Spirit: Eilen Itzel Mena and Jemila Isa opens on the 26th of March, 2025 until the 26th of April, 2025 at Bolanle Contemporary, The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ
©2025 Bolanle Contemporary
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