Exhibition Opening: Tabacco Echoes by Ngozi Ajah Schommers and Etinosa Yvonne

We warmly invite you to the opening of the exhibition Tabacco Echoes by Ngozi Ajah Schommers and Etinosa Yvonne

Tobacco Echoes begins where the echoes still linger, in the fields, drying barns, and the lived experiences of tobacco farmers in Oyo State, Nigeria. Artists Ngozi Ajah Schommers and Etinosa Yvonne listen to a plant whose global histories are shaped by labour, care, and colonial trade. Their works honour the women whose often-unseen work sustained tobacco cultivation and ask what remains as global demand for tobacco declines.

Schommers’ delicate drawings of tobacco leaves in Golden Loop (2026) invite us to experience the plant’s transformation during the drying process. Her confetti assemblages Roll and Puff (2026) trace the gestures of labour and pleasure. Etinosa Yvonne’s photo series Koba Care (2026) portrays tobacco farmers and landscapes in transition. In their sound installation Enwụrụ (2026), the artists reflect on their joint research, personal memories, and the manifold relationships with tobacco in Nigeria.

Fragmentary and polyphonic, Schommers and Yvonne weave together memories, gestures, and landscapes. In doing so, they gently rewrite tobacco’s global history from the perspective of those who have lived and worked with the plant for generations.

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Ngozi Schommers is a Nigerian/ German visual artist, living and working in Bremen, Germany.

Etinosa Yvonne is a documentary photographer, photojournalist and multidisciplinary artist based in Abuja, Nigeria.

The exhibition is part of the research-exhibition project “Knowing Plants. Ecologies of Memory and Practice” at the Global Heritage Lab, University of Bonn.

We look forward to welcoming you and to the conversations the exhibition will inspire.