Rita Omuwa Omozuafoh/ Silenced

Rita Omuwa Omozuafoh is a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Their practice explores the surreal dimensions of inhabiting a Black body, navigating migration, and unpacking identity as a route to self-understanding. Drawing on African spiritual motifs and traditional tarot iconography, Omuwa fuses symbolism with portraiture to create layered visual narratives. Their work includes the book layout and architecture for Ani Kayode's debut novel And Then He Sang A Lullaby (2023), and portrait photography featured in PhotoVogue. Their work will also appear in the upcoming issue of Wreath 6 (2026).

Rita Omuwa Omozuafoh’s work sits at the intersection of surrealism, identity, and the lived experience of migration. As a Nigerian artist working in the UK, Rita is drawn to the strangeness of inhabiting a Black body across borders, the way identity shifts, fractures, and reforms depending on where you stand. She uses illustration to make sense of that instability. She draws heavily from African spiritual motifs and traditional tarot iconography, treating both as visual languages of symbol and meaning rather than as aesthetic references. Tarot's structure, its archetypes, and its way of narrating internal states through image offer her a framework for portraiture that goes beyond likeness. Ultimately, she makes work that treats the surreal not as escape, but as the most honest way to depict what it actually feels like to live between places, histories, and selves.