Editorials
REVIEW: An Architecture of Refusal
In Abuja, a single open bookshelf is set against the quiet closure of the law. The staging is too sparse for its subject; the performance and the manuscript that travel with it are not.
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On 2 August 2019, Abubakar Idris — known to thousands online as Dadiyata — was abducted from his home in Kaduna by unknown armed men. He was 34, a university lecturer, a husband, a father, and a relentless political commentator. Seven years on, under section 164(1) of the Evidence Act 2011, he may now be legally presumed dead: a rebuttable presumption that arrives without naming a perpetrator, without an account of what happened, and without justice. It offers the form of closure while answering nothing. Where Is Dadiyata? — an ambitious travelling exhibition, manuscript and public intervention developed under the Goethe-Institut Nigeria’s Art & Country initiative — is built specifically to deny that closure. The project is a counter-event to the legal threshold.
In its Abuja edition, hosted at the Gatefield Office, a public strategy and media group, the exhibition rests on a single stark spatial gesture: a plain wooden bookshelf standing isolated in the centre of the room beside an empty chair. The shelf holds the man’s physical relics — his books, garments, prints, and a radio playing music he listened to.
As an architectural decision, the open shelf functions as an anti-coffin. Where a coffin closes a life to bury a body, the open shelf holds memory, text and questions in public circulation. And yet in Abuja, a city that held very little of Dadiyata’s life, the installation risks feeling sparse. Standing alone at the centre of the room, the shelf lacks the contextual scaffolding to flesh out the man behind the handle. Viewers are left confronting a solitary object that holds his belongings without fully conveying his trajectory, and the space feels diminished by it. A deeper account of the man, and of the motivations behind his politics, could have been drawn out here.
That physical sparsity was electrified by live performance. Opening the show, the spoken-word poet Al Amin Al Hassan delivered a haunting rendition of his poem Silence as Language, turning the room’s quiet into a visceral confrontation with what the project frames as state-sponsored erasure. Hassan’s performance bridged text and space, demonstrating how oral performance can activate an otherwise minimal environment.
Beyond its physical components, the exhibition raises uncomfortable questions about public memory and the making of civic heroes. In the years since his disappearance, public discourse, including Amnesty International’s 2020/21 report, has repeatedly canonised Dadiyata as an “activist”. The manuscript records something more precise: he was a university lecturer, an outspoken political commentator, and a champion of the Kwankwasiyya movement. Reframing him as a neutral activist exposes the limits of public memory — how a society processing state violence flattens partisan actors into broad civic symbols to make their loss universally consumable. Acknowledging that Dadiyata was a partisan critic does not excuse his disappearance. It sharpens the point: in Nigeria, even belonging to an opposition network offers no protection against total erasure. Where the Abuja exhibition is minimal, the accompanying manuscript provides a rigorous counter-archive.
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Across three sections — Part I: The Question, Part II: Memory Refuses, and Part III: Disappearance & Refusal — it gathers essays, poetry, legal analysis and visual archives. Seyi Lasisi applies a sharp political analysis to the deliberate mechanism of state-sponsored erasure and its use as public discipline. Ogochukwu Umeadi offers a biting satire, 66 Ways to Completely Erase a Man, breaking down the administrative procedure that turns horror into background noise. Sulaiman A.M. draws a brilliant historical parallel in The Pattern That Eats Its Own, setting the failed 1984 kidnapping of Umaru Dikko in a wooden crate against Dadiyata’s 2019 disappearance into fog. The project demonstrates how contemporary art and curatorial intervention can serve as tools for civic reflection. The Abuja layout would have benefited from a richer spatial framework to match its emotional stakes. But the broader project succeeds in transforming a legal threshold into an ongoing public trial. In refusing the neatness of legal closure — and as it travels on to Kaduna and then Lagos — the exhibition ensures that until the state provides answers, the question remains unburied. We continue to ask: Where Is Dadiyata?
Where Is Dadiyata? was presented at the Gatefield Office, Abuja, from 2 to 20 August 2026, and travels to Kaduna and Lagos. The project is the 2026 edition of Art & Country, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria.
Aisha Aliyu-Bima is a writer and critic based in [city]. [One-line bio to be supplied.] All photographs by Aisha Aliyu-Bima.
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