Confronting the Western Gaze with Adaeze Ihebom

Artist and documentarian Adaeze Ihebom is a Nigerian/Italian artist based in London. She uses her camera as a means to document herself through relective self portraiture and women.

Throughout the course of Ada’s takeover and live interview she spoke from a space of respect for the women she chose to document for her documentary series My Little Village: a “personal project aimed to change the idea of how Westerners view Africans in the media.”

Without a thorough knowledge of the language, Ada equipped herself with a translator and her camera and roamed the villages of her origins to find her sitters, who she explains, were apprehensive at first. Whether she was telling stories of women torn from their youth and pushed into early marriage, significant tragedy even her own mother, Ada’s goal was the same: to dignify African stories and tell them without victimization, but power and truth.