As you enter HOME Manchester, you are greeted by a sense of expansive ambition. The multi-use space boasts two theatres, five cinema screens, a bar and cafe space, and an art gallery. It feels like the 256 of art galleries, welcoming sticky floors and mischief on Saturday night, only to scrub up well and offer a Sunday roast by noon the next day. Now, while the space is versatile, it is assured in its offering; an ‘open and social space for the curious’. HOME combines form and technology to curate art spaces that are uniquely playful – it may be experimental, but it is not confused.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Pearl White Dive,2024, oil on canvas (right).
Roots in the Sky, curated by British-Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, is a group exhibition that refuses to simplify. Inspired by diaspora, memory, and cultural hybridity, the show brings together works by ten contemporary artists from Europe, West Africa, and the United States. Adeniyi-Jones’ curatorial hand is evident throughout, shaping a conversation between abstraction and figuration, myth and personal history.
The exhibition sets out its inclusivity from the start. Visitors are welcomed with a card developed in collaboration with Venture Arts, where Amber’s easy-to-read guide breaks down the show’s themes in clear, digestible language. Some of these guides are printed on pink paper, a particularly thoughtful touch designed to support comprehension for those with dyslexia. It is a welcome reminder of how well HOME combines accessibility and artistic ambition, not compromising one for the other.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia, Fight/Flight of the Birds, 2025, Fall of the Crocodiles, 2025, Civility, 2025, Allegory of the Third of May, 2025.
It is Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia’s piece that dominates the gallery’s opening space. A large-scale immersive diptych, it is immediately commanding. Four interlinked pieces, Fight/Flight of the Birds (2025), Fall of the Crocodiles (2025), Allegory of the third of May (2025) (a sculpture posed to the right of the hanging oil) and Civility (2025), unfold on washi, a traditional Japanese paper. The first panel, Fight/Flight, unfolds in a muted wash of oranges, beiges and browns, its palette cooling towards the left. Three main figures appear, partly shrouded by pigment, while a skeletal figure hauls itself up the rocky incline at the lower right- part pilgrim, part revenant.
The leftmost figure, whose gender eludes easy definition, kneels with a hand pressed to their chest, the other reaching skyward. Above them, dominating the panel, an amber-winged bird stretches its enormous wingspan across the frame. The creature is less protective and more of a separate force, though its feathers do form a canopy, sheltering the cluster of human figures beneath. Directly under its beak sits another figure, legs splayed, arms crossed over the chest in a gesture of shield bearing. This figure looks directly at us with an insistent gaze.
Across the triptych, Onwochei-Garcia’s allegorical language thickens. The right-hand panel, Fall of the Crocodiles, ushers in a different kind of turmoil. A horse—traditionally a symbol of martial order—appears twisted mid-air, hooves flailing, caught between falling and flying. The scene teeters on the brink of the militaristic, yet the artist undercuts that reading with a note of near-surreal subversion. A woman in a yellow dress, its brightness the only real flare of saturated colour in the panel, hurtles away from the horse or perhaps merely advances in her own direction, refusing its trajectory entirely. She wears a copper galea helmet, and in each hand she grips what seem to be weapons, looking behind her, over her right shoulder. There is a distinct bizarreness to both images, as what seems to be a crocodile tail, or main body, connect both panels.
Tschabalala Self, At Home- Man in Yellow in Pink Room, 2022 (left)
Sahara Longe, Hospital Scene, 2025 (right)
The panels are steeped in symbolism. Pallas Athene, goddess of strategic warfare, ‘enlightened’ wisdom and often colonial misreadings, threads herself through the panels’ logic. Horses represent the state of nature; crocodiles—central in Igbo cosmology—suggest both primal wisdom and deception. Fire flickers repeatedly, a nod to Prometheus and, through him, the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, where a reproduction of a Prometheus painting was documented. Onwochei-Garcia retools that colonial emblem into a cypher of Black resistance and agency. It is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. Her whole project interrogates the mixed-race condition—Spanish, German, Nigerian—and the uneasy demand for ‘authenticity’ that shadows those who live between identities.
What makes Onwochei-Garcia’s work so central within Roots in the Sky is that it mirrors and magnifies Adeniyi-Jones’s own curatorial logic. His practice—steeped in West African heritage, fable, and ceremonial symbol—provides the conceptual point of departure for the exhibition as a whole. Here, diasporic histories are not tethered to a single region or narrative arc but sprawl into multiplicity. As Bernardine Evaristo writes, “We consist of multiples… descended as we are from fifty-four African countries and over thirty Caribbean countries… I believe in pluralism versus essentialism, always and all ways.” Onwochei-Garcia’s work embodies this ethos precisely: impossible to reduce, defiantly hybrid, alive with contradiction. It sits comfortably among the other artists—Tschabalala Self, Joy Labinjo, Nengi Omuku. Others whose practices engage with lineage, community, mythology, and transformation.
Adeniyi-Jones’s selection also echoes the current surge of attention towards Nigerian modernism—evident in the Tate Modern’s own Nigerian Modernism exhibition. But Fall of the Crocodiles avoids the pitfalls of moment-making. It refuses to flatten history into fashion. Onwochei-Garcia’s immersive panels and mixed media work exemplify the show’s ambition, bridging narrative, spectacle, and deep cultural inquiry.
Adeniyi-Jones brings together artists who challenge linear narratives and resist reduction, allowing their works to speak in layered, intersecting registers. HOME Manchester proves itself once again to be a space where accessibility, ambition, and experimentation coexist, offering visitors an exhibition that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant.
