There is a word in Yoruba โ aแนฃแบน โ that describes the divine energy running through all living things: the power to make things happen, to produce change, to bring the sacred into contact with the material world. It is not metaphor. It is not nostalgia. It is an active, present force that Yoruba cosmology holds to be as real as gravity. When Vince Fraser named his landmark immersive show Aแนฃแบน: Afro Frequencies, he was not reaching for an exotic title. He was making a precise claim: that digital art, at its most charged, is a channel for this energy โ that the screen, the pixel, the layer, the light can carry something old and alive.
Over fifteen years of documentation, African Digital Art has watched a thread of spiritual practice run quietly but insistently through the work of African and diasporan digital artists. It has not always been named as such. It has appeared as mythology, as ancestral portraiture, as surrealist landscape, as symbolic iconography. But the impulse is consistent: African digital artists are encoding the sacred into the digital, and they are doing so with deliberate intention. This is not decoration. It is a form of resistance, of reclamation, and โ in the truest sense of the word โ of transmission.
What Was Taken, and What Survived
How colonialism attacked African spiritual systems โ and why they persisted anyway
To understand what African digital artists are doing with spiritual tradition, you have to understand what colonialism did to African spiritual systems. The campaign was comprehensive. Missionary Christianity and Islam, colonial law, and the apparatus of cultural suppression worked together across the continent and throughout the diaspora to render African spiritual practices as primitive, dangerous, or simply nonexistent. Orisha became devils. Ancestors became superstition. Ritual became spectacle for the anthropological gaze. The archive that was built โ the photographs, the ethnographic texts, the museum collections โ was an archive of erasure as much as documentation.
And yet African spiritual traditions survived. They survived through syncretism โ the fusion with Catholicism that produced Candomblรฉ, Santerรญa, and Vodou in the diaspora. They survived underground, in practice, in oral transmission, in the continuous observance of communities that refused to forget. They survived in the visual โ in the colours associated with specific Orishas, the symbols of particular deities, the materials of altars and ceremonies that carried meaning across generations.
It is this survival that African digital artists are now amplifying. The digital is not replacing the spiritual. It is the newest medium through which transmission has always happened.
Over fifteen years of documentation, African Digital Art has watched a thread of spiritual practice run quietly but insistently through the work of African and diasporan digital artists. It has not always been named as such. It has appeared as mythology, as ancestral portraiture, as surrealist landscape, as symbolic iconography. But the impulse is consistent: African digital artists are encoding the sacred into the digital, and they are doing so with deliberate intention. This is not decoration. It is a form of resistance, of reclamation, and โ in the truest sense of the word โ of transmission.
Decolonising the Sacred: Data Oruwari
Reclaiming a spiritual identity
The most explicit articulation of this project in the ADA archive comes from Data Oruwari (also featured as Data Oh), a self-taught visual artist of Nigerian descent whose stated mission is the decolonisation of African spirituality. Her work does not circle around this intention โ it announces it directly.
โMy work aims to decolonize and reclaim a spiritual identity thatโs been damaged from centuries-long โdemonizationโ of afro-indigenous belief systems,โ she has written, โby telling stories of how my ancestors understood the nature of our collective existence.โ The images she produces โ imbued with celestial figures, gilded details, natural motifs, and ancestral symbolism โ are not illustrations of mythology. They are acts of restoration. Each work proposes a version of African spirituality that was never demonic, never primitive, never in need of correction by an outside faith.
For Oruwari, art is a pathway to awakened consciousness and emotional restoration โ her works serve as both a celebration and a reclamation, drawing attention to the vibrancy and relevance of ancestral wisdom. The digital medium matters here: it gives her access to light, colour, and layering that amplifies the sacred rather than flattening it into illustration. The luminosity of her pieces is theological as much as aesthetic.
Looking Back to Look Forward: รsรฌkรฒ and Odera Igbokwe
Two artists making the Orishas visible โ one reaching into the past, one into the future
If Oruwari works from healing and restoration, รsรฌkรฒ โ the London-based Nigerian artist Ade Okelarin, whose name means โtimeโ or โthe momentโ in Yoruba โ works from the desire to make the Orishas seen, fully and on their own terms, while insisting on their relevance to the present. His Guardians and Of Myth and Legend series combine traditional photography with AI, digital editing, and collage to reimagine Yoruba deities: Olokun, goddess of the oceans; Osanyin, deity of the forest and the medicinal; Sango, the thunder deity; Aje, spirit of trade and wealth. His stated premise is โlooking back to look forwardโ โ to know where Africans are from as a society and help carve a future โshaped not by Westernization, but a grounding of cultural ideology and aesthetics.โ
What รsรฌkรฒ brings to this practice that distinguishes it is a deliberate mapping of Yoruba cosmology onto global mythology โ noticing that Sango and Thor are both thunder deities who carry weapons and burn with warrior energy, that Olokun and Poseidon both rule the sea. This is not syncretism or equivalence. It is a claim of parity: Yoruba spiritual knowledge is not regional folklore but a cosmological system as rich and internally coherent as any tradition the West has elevated to universality. The AI and digital tools in รsรฌkรฒโs practice are not aestheticising devices but a means of amplifying this claim โ giving the Orishas the visual scale and grandeur that their status demands.
His series Lost Songs of the Middle Passage extends the spiritual into the historical in an entirely different register: a meditation on the people who drowned during the transatlantic slave trade, and on the culture that survived the crossing. The Orishas were themselves transmitted across that passage โ carried in the bodies and memories of enslaved people, surviving in Candomblรฉ, Santerรญa, and Vodou. รsรฌkรฒโs images of these lost figures are both elegy and testament to that survival.
Odera Igbokwe works the same cosmology through a different formal lens. Their project Melanin Mythologies centres the African diaspora in fantasy and science fiction, creating illustrations and character designs inspired by Orishas and Odinani. Where รsรฌkรฒ uses photography and AI to insist on the majestic embodied reality of the divine, Igbokwe works in illustration to expand the Orishas into speculative genre spaces that have historically excluded Black and African cosmologies entirely โ claiming not just that these deities existed, but that they belong in the imaginative futures we are building now.
Together, รsรฌkรฒ and Igbokwe represent two strategies for the same problem: how do you give visual presence to a spiritual tradition that dominant culture has rendered invisible, exotic, or threatening? One reaches into the past and holds it up, luminous and undeniable. The other reaches into the future and insists the Orishas are already there.
Odera Igbokwe: Creator of Melanin Mythologies and Afro-Diasporic Fantasy
Aแนฃแบน as Immersive Experience: Vince Fraser
When African spiritual energy moves off the screen and into the body of the viewer
Vince Fraser has spent more than twenty years developing what he calls Afro-surrealism: a visual practice that holds African cultural and spiritual knowledge within the formal vocabulary of surrealism, digital manipulation, 3D modelling, augmented reality, and now immersive installation. Inspired by the idea of aแนฃแบน, the West African concept relating to our power to produce change, his project Aแนฃแบน: Afro Frequencies celebrates the historical, social, and cultural aspects of the Black experience.
What Fraser adds to the conversation is scale. Aแนฃแบน: Afro Frequencies has toured Miami, London, and Las Vegas โ bringing African spiritual cosmology into the immersive experience format that has become one of contemporary cultureโs most powerful modes of engagement. This is not incidental. The immersive format envelops the viewer; it asks for a different kind of attention than a gallery wall allows. To stand inside Aแนฃแบน is to be surrounded by African spiritual energy rendered in light, sound, and motion โ an experience structurally closer to ceremony than to exhibition.
ย
Fraserโs practice also demonstrates how the digital toolkit evolves alongside the spiritual project. From early 2D vector work and photomontage through 3D modelling and augmented reality, he has consistently found new technologies for the same transmission: making aแนฃแบน felt in the body of the viewer, not just seen on the screen.
Surrealism as Spiritual Grammar: Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba
Why the dreamlike is the most honest language for depicting what exceeds ordinary visibility
Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba works the intersection of spirituality, identity, queerness, and Afrofuturism in digital collages that use the surrealist mode not as a European avant-garde inheritance but as a natural language for depicting what exceeds ordinary visibility. In Alexisโs work, African bodies, spiritual iconography, and dreamlike landscapes converge to form narratives negotiating both personal and collective histories.
The surrealist register is particularly apt for spiritual subject matter. The Orishas do not obey ordinary logic. Ancestral presence is not subject to the visible spectrum. Dreams are a recognised channel of communication with the divine in many African traditions. When Tsegba places African figures in landscapes that float free of ordinary space and time, layering spiritual iconography through photographic fragments and gestural marks, the formal strategy is itself a kind of theological argument: the world the work depicts is the real world, the one in which the sacred and the material are not separate.
Embodying the Divine: James C. Lewis
Grounding the Orishas in the Black human figure โ intimate, present, and alive
Where รsรฌkรฒ and Igbokwe work through photography, AI, and illustration to expand the imaginative territory of the Orishas, James C. Lewis approaches the same tradition through digital portraiture โ placing real human bodies directly into the frame of divine representation. Intrigued by the story, characters, and regality of the Orishas, Lewis embarked on a dedicated digital photography project to express them as he envisioned them: Sango, Obatala, Ogun, Oya, Osun, Osumare, Babalu-aye, and others, each rendered with the full visual weight of contemporary portrait photography.
The choice matters. Lewis insists that the Orishas are not abstract symbols or mythological relics but living presences capable of being embodied in Black bodies, recognised, and represented with the authority of contemporary visual culture behind them. The result sits between portraiture and iconography โ images that function the way altarpieces once did, as focal points for recognition and reverence. Where รsรฌkรฒ layers AI and collage to give the Orishas grandeur and cosmic scale, Lewis grounds them in the human figure, insisting on their intimacy and their presence in the here and now.
Together, these three artists โ รsรฌkรฒ, Igbokwe, and Lewis โ represent a full spectrum of strategies for making the Orishas visible: the AI-amplified claim of cosmological parity, the illustrative claim of imaginative centrality, and the photographic claim of embodied reality. Each is necessary. Each makes a different argument about what it means for Yoruba spiritual tradition to be alive in the present.
What the Digital Can Hold
The screen is secular by default. These artists are changing that.
Taken together, these artists are making a claim that the mainstream art world has been slow to recognise: that African spiritual traditions are not background context for contemporary digital art, but active, shaping forces within it. The digital is not secular by nature. The screen is not neutral. When African artists bring Orisha cosmology, ancestral presence, and sacred knowledge into digital form, they are not translating something old into something new. They are asserting that the old and the new were never as separate as modernity insisted.
The transmission has always moved through available media โ through carved wood, through painted cloth, through the drum, through the body in ceremony. The screen is simply the newest surface. What moves through it, for these artists, is unchanged: aแนฃแบน, the power to produce change, moving from the ancestor to the present, insisting on its own continuity.
Explore the spirituality thread across the ADA archive at africandigitalart.com/tag/african-spiritualityย
