Wuh.ey - “Mama wa Barabara”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Mama wa Barabara”

On a dusty street, somewhere between market and myth, three realities collide: a young woman in a surreal pose, a masked man with a shell face—and the painted goddess on the wall. The scene seems like frozen movement, a dance between body, symbol, and street.

"Mama wa Barabara" – the Mother of the Street – is a work about urban spirituality. Wuh.ey merges ritual and everyday life, mural and body, faith and pop. The figure on the wall, painted in the style of West African sign art, gazes down like a patron saint of passersby. She is beautiful, austere, omnipresent. In front of her, the real body bends – flexible, vulnerable, alive – as if it were an offering to the city itself.

There's movement in the background: people walk, cars honk, the city comes alive. But in the center, this strange calm remains – a moment of trance. The masked man watches like a ghost, a sentinel, perhaps a reminder of the ancestors who never disappeared here, merely appearing differently.

Wuh.ey plays with the idea of ​​presence as syncretism: The sacred dwells between asphalt and noise, the goddesses wear sneakers, and holiness arises from friction. "Mama wa Barabara" is a manifesto for the sacred in chaos, for grace amidst noise, for dignity in motion.

In this urban liturgy, even the street becomes a temple.