Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 19, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba TUESDAY AUGUST 19, 2025 ● ARTS & LIFE EDITOR: JILL WILSON 204-697-7018 ● ARTS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ARTS ● LIFE SECTION C CONNECT WITH THE BEST ARTS AND LIFE COVERAGE IN MANITOBA ▼ I N the spring of 2014, 276 girls were abduct- ed from their school in Chibok, Nigeria, by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram. It was a shocking story that made headlines all over the world and sparked the global #BringBackOurGirls movement. Many high-pro- file people, including then-U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and actor/activist Angelina Jolie, raised awareness about the missing Nigerian girls. And then, they faded from view. Nigerian-born, Winnipeg-based visual art- ist Habeeb Andu doesn’t want people to forget them, or the thousands of others who have been kidnapped in the 11 years since. Nor does he want people to ignore the fact that the mass kidnapping of schoolchildren continues to plague his home country. The powerful large-scale mixed-media works that comprise his first solo exhibition in Canada, Theatre of War — on view at 226 Main Street Gallery until Aug. 30 — force the viewer to look head-on at an epidemic from which the rest of the world has mostly turned away. On the gallery’s walls are large canvases that evoke classroom blackboards, giving the sense of lessons interrupted by violence. Some of them have bullet holes. Others have splatters of paint that look disconcertingly like blood. A math problem is cut off by an urgent mes- sage, written in blue: “Run! Run!! Run!!!” Andu’s art is not confined to the walls. On the floor below the canvases are mounds of clothing. A single shoe. A forgotten school cap. Left behind in the haste of escape, one hopes, though the reality is likely far more bleak. “Any time I’m painting, I try to put myself in the shoes of the victims. I should be able to express the way they feel. That’s why, sitting down before I paint, I try to meditate and try to make use of the best symbol for me to portray the story,” says Andu, 37. One of the most visceral symbols in Theatre of War is also its most tangible: Andu’s use of spent bullet casings. There are piles of them, littered all over the gallery floor. Seeing them scattered among the clothing, in particular, is a harrowing reminder of the terror these children have experienced in their young lives. Using spent casings to tell this particular story is an idea he’s had for years, but would have been impossible in Nigeria. Andu picks up a single casing and turns it over between his fingers. “In my country, you can’t have this. You can go to jail for this,” he says. You could be labelled an armed robber or worse, even if you just found a casing on the ground, he explains. It was too risky to make art with them. “I still have a future to go.” But in Winnipeg, where he has lived with his wife for the past three years, Andu marvelled that he could just ask for them — hundreds of them — sourcing the spent casings from a local shooting range. “Even if these empty cases don’t come from my country, I was still able to portray my stories for the viewers to understand,” he says. With support from both the Winnipeg Art Coun- cil and the Manitoba Art Council, Andu created most of these works in the past few months. “It takes a lot of sleepless nights,” he says. But the work is important. He sees it as a document of a time and place, and what he wants viewers to understand most of all is that kid- napping is a current national security crisis in Nigeria. This isn’t the past. It’s now. And for the kidnappers, it’s lucrative. “Kidnapping is now a business, a business venture where you can make money, and the gov- ernment is not ready to take it seriously,” he says. Bandits, as they are known, will kidnap people and demand high ransoms with few repercus- sions. “Sometimes they kill some of them even after they receive the money,” Andu says. A CCORDING to a BBC analysis from 2021, children are targeted by kidnappers be- cause their abductions are more high-pro- file and the government is more likely to get in- volved, which could mean bigger ransom payouts. The Nigerian government insists it does not pay ransoms, but experts quoted in various interna- tional media outlets suggest that isn’t true. That kidnapping so frequently happens to children at school, a place that is supposed to be a safe sanctuary for learning, adds a layer of violence. Andu points out that the spectre of kidnapping looms so large that kids are dropping out or are being withdrawn from schools — often dilapidat- ed places with poor security — by their terrified parents. Per UNICEF, about 10.5 million of Nige- ria’s children aged five to 14 are not in school. Zooming out, one in every five of the world’s out-of-schoolchildren is in Nigeria. “The reason I titled it Theatre of War is that it is a fight between insurgents and our educational system. The bandits see our children as a target for the government to respond to — and the government doesn’t take rapid action towards it,” Andu says. “I believe through these works, my little impacts would make the government change and take its own security of the country more seriously.” jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca JEN ZORATTI EXHIBITION PREVIEW THEATRE OF WAR By Habeeb Andu ● 226 Main Street Gallery ● To Aug. 30 Theatre of War is open at 226 Main Street Gallery until Aug. 30. Habeeb Andu’s Missing Treasures II PHOTOS BY MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Artist Habeeb Andu says the kidnapping of children in Nigeria is a national security crisis. Bullets and casings litter the ground at the Theatre of War exhibition. Habeeb Andu’s Eyewitness III Innocents project Epidemic of children being kidnapped in Nigeria focus of art exhibition ;