Through Is This a Woman?, Dandelion Eghosa presents a powerful and necessary meditation on what it means to document queer lives under the weight of erasure, exile, and censorship, particularly on the African continent. First shown at the Breda Photo Festival, the series began as an uncensored response to their 2018 debut solo exhibition and continues to challenge the ways visibility, anonymity, and care coexist in queer archiving.

At its heart, this body of work wrestles with a paradox: the desire to be remembered and the right to remain unseen. In societies like Nigeria, where systemic homophobia imposes violent consequences, visibility can be both a lifeline and a threat.

Is This a Woman? resists the assumption that storytelling must always involve exposure. Instead, it proposes obscurity, through masks, shadows, montage, and metaphor, as a radical, ethical, and loving form of resistance. Masking, for Eghosa, is not concealment for its own sake. It is a tool rooted in queer cultures such as ballroom, ritual, and drag, and a survival mechanism in the face of surveillance and repression. It allows for movement across time, place, and meaning.

These images, often composed in private, intimate spaces shared with friends and chosen family, are created through conversations, not poses. The artist enters into communion with their subjects, who evolve from sitters into co-authors, their stories folded into each collage, each layer of ambiguity.

The series draws on Eghosa’s deep archival practice, which spans photography, poetry, and death doula work. To care about queer life is, for them, to care about queer death. If I care about your life, I care about your death, they say. In cultures where queer people are often exiled, who will bear witness when they die? Who will wash the body, speak their name, plan their wake? These are not rhetorical questions, but everyday realities that shape the artist’s way of seeing, remembering, and honoring.

Through this work, Eghosa confronts the long history of queer erasure and colonial disruption that has warped narratives across generations. Is This a Woman? reclaims space for ancestors whose images were destroyed or never captured, whose talents were consumed while their truths were denied. It also offers testament to the vibrant lives of those surviving today, queer Nigerians raising families, building homes, living full and radical lives, often hidden in plain sight.

Eghosa’s methodology is rooted in care, collaboration, and ancestral continuity. Each image is an act of defiance, not because it demands to be seen, but because it chooses how to be seen. In doing so, this work asks urgent questions:
Who owns a story?
Who gets to tell it?
How do we remember those who cannot be named?
What does it mean to archive ethically, when visibility is dangerous and forgetting is violent?

In Is This a Woman?, Dandelion Eghosa offers not answers, but an invitation to witness without intrusion, to remember with consent, and to archive with love.

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