Folktales
Beyond
Borders

  • Hello, I’m Abiosè.

    I am a Nigerian-born artist working between memory, storytelling, diaspora, and heritage. My studio practice is rooted in the oral traditions I grew up with in Lagos, particularly the cultural ritual of the TV series Tales by Moonlight, where stories were shared at dusk and carried lessons across generations.

    After becoming a mother in the African diaspora, WHO IS MARRIED TO a wonderful non-Yoruba, I found myself retelling these stories—first for my children, and then through painting. This body of work emerges from that act of reconnection and preservation. Each piece draws from African folktales across different countries, where animals, landscapes, and domestic spaces become vessels for memory and meaning.

    “Folktales Beyond Borders” explores how stories travel—how they shift across geographies, generations, and identities—while remaining rooted in cultural inheritance. In this way, painting becomes both an archive and a continuation of African oral storytelling traditions. Importantly, these works are small by design for African stories belong in the stars too. They always have.

    Born in Lagos, my early life continues to inform my sensitivity to narrative, community, and resilience. Alongside my artistic practice, I work as a medical doctor in family medicine, a role that deepens my engagement with human stories in another form.

    At its core, my work is about transmission and centering: carrying stories forward and creating space for them to live again.

  • I paint African folktales — secondarily as illustrations and nostalgia, but primarily as a deliberate act of teaching reconstruction - as fine artistic lecture

    You see, I grew up with Tales by Moonlight. Stories told at dusk, carried across generations through voices, bodies, and shared attention. Each story, told aloud, felt in the body while being understood by the mind. As an artist creating from a point of view of teachable philosophy with Pangaea as the guiding concept, I have come to experience them as a stimulation of our sensory and even motoric pathways - adding to why I create artworks of them.

    The philosophy was born of the question from a bird's eye view, What now?

    These paintings are reconstructive.

    I chose folktales because they already contain the answer. The elephant doesn't mourn the short snout. The struggle with the crocodile transforms him. The tortoise falls from the sky, his shell cracks, and he survives. Every folktale across this continent and world carry similar encoded messages that collectively set the foundation for the collective character of a place and its people. I paint in a style anyone can read — not for those with artistic training, but for anyone who grew up hearing these folktales. I paint at 50x60cm because I want these works to travel easily. Across borders, eventually beyond them and into space.

    The philosophy is apex-frontier postcontemporary, with a specific wording(*) — it looks forward. It asks that you return to your own sensory and motoric experience, to your own body's knowledge, before sound, language and theory and inherited history thoughts get there first.

    That is where transformation lives. You hear, see, experience the art, you react. That point between receiving the information and processing it to create the next information. That's the part the philosophy is broadening - that's the silence the philosophy is asking us to sit with because by passing attention to it, we lengthen time spent there, broadening it. this training will naturally extend to other aspects of our lives. This understanding brings the transformation. This is where the transformation is lying await in us all as a globe, a singular cell.

    Folktales Beyond Borders is an invitation — to every African, in every diaspora, in every circumstance, and importantly, to Pangaea — to experience the space between.

    What now?
    We build.

    (*) Apex frontier Postcontemporary art as I carve out and define it is a forward-looking sensorimotoric philosophy distinguished by a re-constructive, global, human ethos which posits that sensorimotoric experience is universal to humanity, and that this experience can inspire understanding and transformation. It has developed with ponderance on new theories of emergence in complexity science, as well as biosemiotics.

SNEAK PEEK

🔊

“Why Bats Fly At Night…

This painting is called “Why Bats fly at night:- the Bat and the Bushrat were friends, It would so happen to be that The Bat was one of the best at cooking in the village. Unfortunately, he was also quite jealous of The Bushrat, who was very handsome. One evening while visiting his friend, The Bushrat had the opportunity to eat The Bat’s food again. After devouring yet another great meal, The Bushrat asked The Bat “how do you cook your delicious soup?!” The Bat said his secret recipe was that he boiled himself in the soup to give it that extra flavour. This was said out of jealousy. The Bushrat ate to his hearts content and said goodbye to his friend. When Bushrat got home, he went immediately to the kitchen to tell his wife, who happened to also have been cooking a pot of soup. She did not believe the story and even laughed at the ridiculous special recipe. A little bit later, when she went to tend to the children, The Bushrat snuck into the kitchen and hopped right into the boiling pot of soup. When the wife came down, she found her husband dead in the pot. She went to the king, crying, to plead her case, and he ordered his soldier ants to imprison The Bat. This news travelled fast amongst the soldier ants, even amongst the ones that were off duty. Two off-duty Soldier ants just so happen to walk past The Bat’s house and were talking about this, which The Bat overheard. That night, he snuck out and into the Deep Dark Forest. Ever since then The Bat only comes out at night, so as to not be found… and imprisoned. The moral of the story is this: dishonesty and disloyalty lead to isolation, while trust once broken is hard to regain.”

As the audience begins to explore it, you will realise that it is part of a system.

50 × 60 cm

Acrylic on Canvas

The moral of the story is this:

 dishonesty and disloyalty lead to isolation, while trust once broken is hard to regain.

“Why Spiders Have Long Legs…

This painting is titled “why spiders have long legs. The Spider loved to eat with friends. He never said “NO” to food, and in fact always complemented his friends’ cooking, in hopes that he’d be invited to eat with them. One day, while walking down the road to get to the river, he smelt some tasty scent coming from The Monkey’s home. Of course, he popped in to meet his friend who was making dodo. Monkey invited him to eat with them, but knowing he’d have to assist in the kitchen as the food was not completely ready yet, he said he was very busy but would love to eat with The Monkey. Just then, The Spider had an idea. He suggested spinning a web to tie between himself and The Monkey and that when the food was ready, Monkey would simply tug on the web. So off he went after spinning the web. Next, he followed his nose to The Snake’s home. Now Snake was preparing yummy banku and mako. He had also just gotten started cooking. The Spider, filled to the brim with hunger accepted the invitation here too, spinning a web to attach to The Snake. He did the same when he followed his nose to The Warthog’s, then Rabbit’s then 4 other friends’ homes! As he approached the river, The Spider celebrated as to how much food was coming his way. When he approached the river, Monkey tugged on the web which pulled at Spider’s 5th leg. Then unbelievably and very much to Spider’s dismay, he was tugged by The Snake, then The Warthog, then The Rabbit; then all 8 friends, in fast succession, within 1 second! And this is how the spider gained its long, long, long, long, long, long legs. The moral of the story is this: Greed and laziness never pay off.”

50 × 60 cm

Acrylic on Canvas

The moral of the story is this:

Greed and laziness never pay off.