Aghogho Otega is a multidisciplinary artist, documentary photographer, and cultural researcher based in Ughelli, Nigeria. Originally from Warri, Nigeria, his work delves into culture, tradition, indigenous religious practices, the environment, and contemporary social issues. His artistic practice is driven by the goals of re-education, cultural preservation, and fostering connectivity within communities.

Adam Lives in Theory is a series that celebrates the male form and reflects on masculinity and perception. It lives in the irregular spaces between truth, expression, and expectation, the carnivalesque angles of view that shift an action along the spectrum of good and evil based on one’s private dialogue or motivations. In this series of nudes, the artist performatively assumes poses taken from the gestures of quotidian life before a mirror. 

Like most elements in this body of work, the mirror represents more than its physical self. It stands for the manners in which we perceive ourselves but also acts as a gateway, a theme pulled from the artist’s childhood memories of his father’s daily prayers at his personal shrine. The shrine contained an altar and a mirror, which his father would interact with in various ways, from speaking to it to anointing it with various materials and powders. In this way, the mirror becomes a portal to the transformative and unknown, perhaps to a different reality. Pulled between the past, the present, and the future, wrapped in the possibilities of different modes of being, Adam lives in this space, going through the motions of life, constantly questioning his life and the lives of those around him as nothing is certain.