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Aròkò Ôbò Moufouli Bello
Aròkò – poetry, metaphor, symbol
Ôbò – relating to femininity
Building on the research developed by Moufouli Bello over recent years, Aròkò Ôbò further extends the reflections initiated in Everything Precious Is Fragile (Venice Biennale, 2024) and Àlá Omìnira (Fondation Claudine Talon, 2025).
Aròkò Ôbò examines, in negative, the forms of power that have historically aimed to control or discipline female bodies, Nature, spiritual and linguistic practices, as well as cosmologies.
While self-determination and forms of resistance run like an undercurrent through her work, this exhibition marks a subtle shift in Moufouli Bello’s practice. The vegetal realm—previously conceived as a symbolic space of withdrawal or repair—here asserts itself as an engaged presence. The composition, the arrangement of plants, and the posture of the bodies instill a complicit relationship between the feminine and the vegetal. Nature thus becomes an autonomous entity, resonating with women and sharing comparable conditions of existence.
Moufouli Bello thereby opens a space for ecofeminist thought—discreet yet deliberate—in which the concept of emancipatory female communities is reconfigured, integrating living beings within their ecosystem. Care emerges as a relational and political principle.
The titles in Yorùbá fully participate in this positioning. As spaces of identification and bearers of autonomous concepts, cosmologies, and situated knowledges, they are inseparable from the works themselves. The figures of Ajè, a feminine spiritual power of healing, embody this articulation between care, responsibility, and the protection of the living. Afusat, guardian of the harmony of Nature, and Yemisi, the gift-child of Yemoja, protector of the waters, inscribe female bodies as mirrors—sites of mediation between the human, spiritual, and vegetal worlds.
Aròkò Ôbò thus interrogates, in negative form, the modes of power that have historically sought to control or discipline female bodies, Nature, spiritual and linguistic practices, and cosmologies.
— Marion Hamard
Moufouli Bello, Atinùké is worried, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 130 cm
Moufouli Bello, ÌBÙKÚN, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 130 cm
Moufouli Bello, Sofia, Iraw, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 220 x 160 cm
Moufouli Bello, ÒFÚRÚFÚ, 2025, Bronze 16 × 6.6 × 10 cm, Edition of 10 + 2 AP
Moufouli Bello, Jojokè, 2026, Wood, 90 glass bowls, cotton fabric, 8 × 32 × 34 cm
