Rokita

_Picture this._ You open the door to your home gallery and a riot of symbols and body parts, arresting female faces, and bold text that speaks directly to your subconscious, sinks its teeth into you. That, dear reader, is the beautiful surrealist art of [Abi Salami](https://www.cohart.com/abisalami/profile), Nigerian-American artist whose work has graced the walls of the African American Museum of Art in Dallas and the C24 Gallery and Field Projects in New York City.

#### Surrealism, but Make It Black, Feminist, and Really Personal


Salami’s paintings nod to Surrealists like Dalí and Magritte, but instead of melting clocks and ants crawling out of pianos, she gives us an interior life that’s deeply rooted in Black diasporic experiences. Imagine Frida Kahlo’s self-lacerating intimacy, but refracted through a kaleidoscope of contemporary Black female subjectivity. That’s the visual language she’s re-writing. Pieces like [_Keeping Kulture Krazy Konstantly_](https://www.cohart.com/artworks/13563) or [_Only Time They Find The Clit Is When They're Trying To Restrict It_](https://www.cohart.com/artworks/14932) haul the personal and the political into the gallery spotlight, demanding attention not just for their visual and hallucinatory audacity but for the deeper stories embedded within. 

In [a recent interview](https://www.cohart.com/news/abi-salami-q-a) with Cohart, Salami touched on identity and intersectionality in her work. In her interview, she positioned surrealism as a political tool and psychological mirror, saying, “My style is rooted in surrealism, a medium that allows me to explore complex narratives through dreamlike, symbolic imagery. I focus on themes that intersect deeply with personal and collective identity, such as race, sexuality, religion, and the impact of societal structures like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. These themes are not just motifs in my work; they are critical reflections of the world we live in. My aim is to create art that challenges viewers to confront these realities while also providing a space for introspection and dialogue.”


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Salami’s work can also be considered in the context of the Afro-Surrealism movement. Afro-Surrealism builds on the foundations of Surrealism but speaks directly to the lived realities of Black artists and the African diaspora. It fuses the uncanny and the fantastical with the weight of history and the present, confronting racial injustice and questions of identity. Consider artists such as Betye Saar and Mickalene Thomas. Emerging in the mid-20th century, it became a way to reimagine the traumas of slavery, segregation, and systemic oppression, transforming them into poetic, dreamlike narratives that also point toward liberation and possibility.

#### A Visual Language That Speaks on Multi-Dimensional Levels


Salami doesn’t just paint to be shocking. Her work contains puzzles, narratives, and performances. Recurrent symbols such as masked visages, dislocated limbs, and typographic flourishes, build a visual lexicon you find yourself trying to decode, like you would the scenes of a strange dream. They’re not just clever, they’re necessary, and more importantly, inventive. In a moment when questions of representation, mental health, and Black femininity demand new iconography, she’s creating it.

#### From Faith in Ideology to Self as Savior

Frida Kahlo’s work immediately came to mind when I saw Salami’s work. Kahlo, marginalized in her own right as a disabled Mexican woman, turned personal pain into feminist performance. Her broken female body, surreal symbolism, and the home as self, she actively redefined what a self-portrait could do. She also made the private political long before “intersectionality” became a buzzword.

Now enter Salami onto the stage. Whether on purpose or not, she uses a Kahlo-like depiction of intimacy and a surreal economy of symbols, but reconceptualizes them in the context of 21st-century Black diasporic psychology. She confronts taboos with bravery, bluntness, and somehow also playfulness. As she said in a recent [interview on Glasstire](https://glasstire.com/2023/04/10/painting-unafraid-an-interview-with-abi-salami/?), “I don’t think anything should be off limits when it comes to art. If society can come up with these taboos, we should also be able to speak to why they are taboo. Also, taboos change as society changes, and it is usually because of art.” Her faces are often masked yet unflinching, her typography both a cry and a scream, her scale theatrical. She positions mental health, sexuality, race, Black bodies, and gender not as afterthoughts but as central themes with contemporary importance.

A great comparison to situate Salami’s work within surrealist canon is between her painting “You Need a Savior (Who Isn’t You and Doesn’t Look Like You)” and Khalo’s painting “Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill.” Both paintings use the body as a stage for social and political confrontation, but of course in radically different contexts. Kahlo’s work is deeply personal, casting Marxism as both literal and symbolic support (giant hands replacing her crutches), while framing the ideology as a solution to healing a burning, fractured world.

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Salami’s piece, by contrast, turns that healing narrative on its head, confronting the myth of the “white savior,” fearlessly interrogating systems of oppression. Her nude Black female figure, posed with arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, and meeting the gaze of a dove with an olive branch, stages an unapologetic reclamation of voice and agency amid symbols of colonialism, slavery, and beauty standards rooted in whiteness. On a single canvas at 80 x 59 inches, she turns the typically European white/male Biblical crucifixion scene on its head.


Where Kahlo offers faith in a political ideology as a liberating force for herself and others, Salami questions the very premise of placing trust in external saviors, especially those complicit in oppression. Kahlo pioneered the “intimate spectacle” as a marginalized Mexican female artist; Salami redefines it for new generations, with mental health and the contemporary Black female experience at the very center.

#### Extending the Canon
Abi Salami’s art shows us that Surrealism is ever-evolving, as she creates a powerful visual language designed to wrestle with the complexities of the lived Black experience. By reframing the Surreal through Black, feminist, and deeply personal lenses, she extends the canon and carves out space for a bold new language, even within Afro-Surrealism. Her work both confronts and invites, forcing us to sit with uncomfortable truths while opening the door to dialogue, healing, and possibility. In the lineage of Kahlo, Dalí, and Magritte, Salami is not merely participating in Surrealism and Afro-Surrealism; she is reshaping it for our time.


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Surrealism reimagined: Abi Salami blends symbolism, Black identity, and feminist power into vivid, uncompromising art.

Spotlight - Abi Salami: Reimagining the Black Feminine

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