A Map of Soft Resistance – Recent works by Promise O’nali – to 19 July

In a world where survival often demands noise, Promise O’nali dares to whisper. His exhibition, A Map of Soft Resistance, unfolds not as a spectacle but as a sanctuary — a visual and emotional cartography of what it means to endure, transform, and become, softly.

Across diptychs, mixed media canvases, and expansive portraits, O’nali traces the quiet topographies of the self — those invisible places where memory settles, ancestry stirs, and healing begins. These works do not scream for attention. Instead, they hold your gaze with a radical kind of stillness. A stillness that speaks. That breathes. That remembers.

O’nali’s language is one of pigment and poise, chromatic alchemy, and symbolic geometry. The human figures he paints — often with eyes closed and heads lifted — exist between worlds: past and present, grief and grace, form and formlessness. They are not portraits of individuals, but vessels of collective experience. Their faces are sometimes obscured or blurred into abstraction, not to erase identity, but to expand it — to suggest universality, myth, and sacred interiority.

Here, softness is not fragility. It is resistance. It is the art of refusing to perform for the gaze, the economy, or the algorithm. These figures are not frozen in trauma but transfigured by it. O’nali gives us bodies carved from memory and coloured by legacy — blue skin like ancestral water, molten gold like divine heat, pinks and corals like the spiritual aura of rebirth. His use of lace — a motif often tied to colonial inheritance and ceremonial beauty — becomes a layered metaphor: both shroud and celebration, burden and bloom.

Ancestral Coordinates, 2023, mixed media on canvas, is riddled with swirls of elemental symbolism, situating the self as a cosmological archive. Stillness is a Weapon, 2025, acrylic on canvas, renders silence as a shield. Cartographer of the Inner Sky, 2025, acrylic on canvas, honours the psyche as sacred terrain, he opines that our dreams are only harmonious to we the dreamers. And in works like Inheritance of Tenderness, 2025, acrylic on canvas, The Quiet Becoming, 2025, acrylic on canvas and Where the Light Enters, 2025, acrylic on canvas, O’nali maps out how memory and love travel through the body — not always in loud proclamations, but in gestures, glances, and frequencies felt more than heard.

This is Black interiority rendered with reverence.

This is African futurism rooted not in spectacle, but in care.

This is softness reclaimed as strength — especially for Black and diasporic bodies so often conditioned to survive by hardening.

The spiritual power of A Map of Soft Resistance lies in its invitation: to slow down, to look inward, and to locate ourselves within a broader constellation of emotional survival. O’nali does not demand answers. Instead, he opens portals — places to rest, to feel, to dream. In doing so, he offers a counter-map to the chaos of our times. A quiet rebellion drawn not in borders, but in breath.

To walk through this exhibition is to step into a psychic geography where healing is posture, and love — unguarded, intergenerational, metaphysical love — becomes both the compass and the destination.

• The exhibition runs to the 19 July
• 10am – 9pm
• room2 Belfast, 32-36 Queen Street, BT1 6EE