'If you don't tell your story, someone will.' Meet the artist reclaiming African culture on its own terms.

Anyanwu's debut exhibition, Objects Of Power, asks what African culture looks like when no one else is holding the pen.

Objects Of Power debuted in Rome earlier this year.

Somto Ajuluchukwu made an intentional decision by not going by his given name.

For his art, he goes by Anyanwu, a name drawn from Igbo cosmology.

"I feel like my eyes are my greatest gift. Anyanwu translates to mean Eye(s) of the Sun. It's the Alusi (god) that observes the people and provides them with light ... the first thing created in almost all stories of creation."

Objects of Power is a series of digitally fabricated sculptures that debuted in Rome earlier this year, the event was produced and co-curated by Iris Peynado.

It's Anyanwu's first exhibition as a visual artist, and it did not arrive without doubt.

Imposter syndrome, he says, is a familiar demon that he has been living with for over a decade.

"I'll never really feel like I'm the chosen one, or this is what I'm supposed to do."

But standing in a San Lorenzo hall in Rome, watching people move through the room in tears, stopping in solemn respect before each piece, it was clear the work had found exactly who it was looking for.

"I really had the grace and the privilege to know what it actually means to be an artist," he says.

"To just create and think and practice. My strongest artistic tool in this project was the story and the essence of the work."

The Ìyóbà (Queen) Idià mask: The eternal source of lineage and resistance.

That story is rooted in African spiritual practice, in traditions that are alive and present, not archived. His artistic philosophy, which he calls Spirit Fiction, is the exploration of African cultures, religions, spiritual practices, and mythology through storytelling.

"It started as a genre to create a strong sense of identity for my company, and it became a personal philosophy."

Traveling through Rome in preparation for his debut, Anyanwu says he found himself thinking about what it means for a civilisation to preserve itself.

"The city absorbs its own history into daily life. Restaurants beside ruins. People living inside buildings from the 1800s. Ancient Rome is not archived but inhabited, woven into the fabric of ordinary life."

"It made me recognise that history doesn't have to be left in history, it can be a part of your everyday."

He lets that sit.

Then, with the calm ease of someone who has never once been afraid of the obvious, he says the thing everyone else in the room is already thinking but would never say out loud.

"Rome was able to do that because they were the conqueror, not the conquered."

What followed was a question he has been carrying for years and the heart of his work.

"What would that look like for African people? What would that look like if we had our civilisation uninterrupted by colonialism and conquest?"

Objects of Power is one attempt to answer it.

The sculptures are infused with sand from sourced from the Osun–Osogbo Sacred Grove in Ogun State, Nigeria is bound into the acrylic enamel, grounding each work in land, ritual, and living spiritual memory.

Seven digitally fabricated reimaginings of sacred African artefacts, each one a question about what these objects could have become.

The Queen Idia Mask, reimagined as a vessel of foresight, her face traced with circuitry and extended forward in time.

The Dogon Walu Mask from Mali, its surface patterned like a microchip, the same astral connection it once carried now mapped onto the language of the internet.

The Sika Dwa Kofi from the Ashanti Kingdom, the Ose Sango Axe from Yoruba tradition, the Ngulu Sword from Central Africa.

The Elongo Shield. The Ankh Key.

Seven objects.

Seven, he notes, is the number of completion in several Nigerian cultures. Even the count is a cultural act.

Culture, he says, needs to be exported. But the problem has never been the sharing. It has always been who does the telling.

"Sometimes I struggle with information, reading if it's actually truth or another preconceived perspective of African people."

The sculptures draw on living spiritual practice, on traditions that exist now as active ways of moving through the world.

Anyanwu was born and based in Lagos and has spent years going directly to the source.

"When you want to read about your history, you see European names," he says. "If I was to buy a book about African sculpture, I'm going to see Susan something in the byline. Susan, were you there? How do you know?"

So he travelled, first in his own backyard.

Between 2017 and 2019 he visited 27 of Nigeria's 36 states, before insecurity made some of those roads impassable.

What he was looking for, he says, does not appear in books written by people who were not there. Lagos, he points out, offers limited answers.

"Lagos is a city that has been stripped of culture, the culture resides in the people and in more contemporary art forms like music, fashion, cinema...the older layers have been largely built over."

The spiritual dimension of the work is the part he speaks about with the most care.

"I am African, and not only am I African, I am spiritual in the African way," he says.

"I love our traditions, and I love our rituals, and I love our way of life, and I love our thinking of the cosmos and the world beyond us."

He grew up in a Christian home, attended a Catholic school, and sat through both Christian and Muslim assemblies as a child.

"Spirituality is one voice that we're experiencing from different angles."

"We're all blind because we cannot see the full lens and breadth of true spirituality. Some people touch it and call it an elephant. If five people touched an elephant and they were blind, someone will touch the side and call it a wall, someone will touch the tail and call it a whip, someone will touch the tusk and call it a sword."

For Anyanwu, putting Objects of Power in front of people is something he carries as a responsibility.

"The only person that can tell your story is you."

"And if you don't tell your story outside the walls of your continent, people are going to tell stories about you."

"I used to think that making African stories would marginalise me or limit me. But then I realised that African stories are for the world."

He is equally clear about what that demands from audiences.

"Forced or purposeful ignorance is pathetic," he says.

"Racism is not a white disease anymore. Neither is it a disease of opposite race. It's a disease period. And the cure is being intentional about your interest."

"If I can understand you, I can love you."

"All cultures need education. All cultures need to be exported. It makes the world a more global society. It blurs the lines between colour and differences."

Objects of Power is his debut as a sculptor, though Anyanwu has spent over a decade building Vortex Corp, a Lagos-based animation and storytelling studio, and the questions driving this work have been with him for all of it.

With the exhibition behind him and the next body of work ahead, he is not slowing down.

"Every single time I'm in a space where there is education to be shared about African culture," he says, "it means I'm in the right space."

Anyanwu's work can be found on Instagram @weareanyanwu