🥤Is art allowed to be subjective anymore?

👋Good afternoon! Over the last week, we’ve been curious about how Nigerians would receive My Father’s Shadow now that it’s available to African audiences digitally. This week, The Peel looks at how people interpret art, why no one should have a monopoly on how a film is understood, and if art loses itself when we treat one interpretation as the definitive one. If you haven’t seen it yet, the weekend is the perfect time to catch up.

Let’s get into it!

In this edition: Inside our conversation with the CEO and creative director behind a Nigerian-owned fashion brand, this week’s cultural moments, New Music Friday, and more.

If you’re enjoying this, don’t forget to subscribe and join The Juice community. We’re building this together ♡.

🗞️ THIS WEEK IN CULTURE

🎵MUSIC

Spotify is bringing Tems home for a special Surround Sound event, giving Premium subscribers a chance to see her perform at an invite-only event in Nigeria. It will mark Tems’ first performance on home soil this year.

It’s the kind of intimate Tems experience we would have loved to attend too, but alas, we didn’t get to participate in the draw.

📽️ FILM

Damilola Orimogunje’s Dear Ajayi has picked up two major honors at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, winning the Bisato d’Oro for Best Cast & Performances and the CICT-UNESCO Enrico Fulchignoni Prize. It is the first Nigerian film selected for competition at Venice Days and will open in Nigerian cinemas on November 13. You can watch the trailer. 

It’s indeed a W year for Nigerian film, as the wins add another milestone to the country’s growing presence on the international festival circuit.

📱TECH

Nigeria has recorded its first tele-robotic surgery with a surgeon remotely operating on a patient in Abuja from a robotic console at Redeemer’s Health Village in Ogun State. The procedure involved removing a cancerous kidney tumor.

The development shows how advanced technology could expand access to specialist medical care, allowing surgeons to operate remotely without requiring patients to travel to where the specialist is based. And yes, a robot helped perform a surgery in Nigeria, which is pretty cool!

✨SPOTLIGHT

Emmanuel Nwachukwu’s The Black Tax has been selected as an official submission for the 2026 Student Academy Awards, putting the Canadian film in consideration at the Academy’s student film competition.

The selection recognizes the cast and crew’s work on an international level. The project will now undergo additional post-production before becoming available for online viewing again.

⚡TRENDING

Fisayo Soyombo’s latest investigative story, reported undercover along one of West Africa’s most dangerous migration routes, is out. He spent 47 days traveling from Nigeria through Niger and Libya alongside migrants attempting to reach Europe.

Aside from documenting the dangers along the route, the investigation gives a closer look at what drives people to risk their lives on the journey, while exposing the realities that can be hidden behind the idea of migration to Europe.

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MAIN SQUEEZE

Kéhìndé Balogun turned curves into RÍRÁN

Kéhìndé Balogun has found a way to make her fashion brand recognizable and distinct. As the founder of RÍRÁN, she has come from years of experimenting, discarding ideas, following her instincts, and figuring out what feels distinctly hers.

From hand-stitching clothes for dolls as a child to studying architecture and eventually building a fashion brand with its own design language, her path to RÍRÁN has been anything but linear.

In this interview, Kéhìndé talks about finding RÍRÁN’s signature, how architecture and art influence her designs, and what it takes to grow a fashion brand without losing its identity.

How did you get into fashion and eventually find yourself building RÍRÁN? Was becoming a designer and running a fashion brand always something you wanted to do?

I started making clothes as a child; I hand-stitched clothing for dolls and graduated into machine tailoring in secondary school, watching runways, experimenting with beading, etc. Back in university, I started making asoebi, custom clothing for clients. 

I quickly figured out that wasn’t my strongest suit or my desired path and pivoted into creating my own designs, which eventually evolved into what RÍRÁN is today.

At some point, my parents discussed fashion school as opposed to going to a university, but the ultimate decision boiled down to having a ‘strong’ first degree, so I pivoted to architecture because I liked technical drawing and buildings.

Your designs have become recognizable enough that people sometimes recreate them. When did you first realize that RÍRÁN had developed a design language people could immediately identify, and what did that mean to you?

After my first two designs, BEBI and MMIRI went viral on the internet, I realized that there was something unique to them, and I was determined to keep up with that authenticity. Everything we designed afterwards was built on the foundation those two created. 

When we dropped our first collection, REVERIE, and people started reporting dupes to us, I realized that we had cemented our design identity: defined silhouettes, vivid palettes, soft sensuality. Our design identity has evolved now and will continue to evolve, but its roots are still visible.

You studied architecture, create fashion, and make art pieces. Do these different practices pour into one another, especially when you’re looking for inspiration or developing a new idea?

All the time! Our design identity and visual choices are rooted in my architecture background. For example, in architecture, I was notorious for my use of curves; everything had to look soft, no matter how technically unrealistic it was. I took that into RÍRÁN; there’s rarely a hard line in our designs.

If there is, it’s typically to emphasize a curve. My art has also strongly influenced my designs, both in its surrealism and in the expression itself.

People see the finished RÍRÁN piece, but not everything that happens before it reaches them. What part of building each piece takes more work than people realize?

I think the toughest parts of designing are translating from sketch to fabric and grading to size. We have a ton of ‘discarded’ samples that simply didn’t come out as expected or couldn’t be scaled. With designs, it’s a game of chance. You sketch, source fabrics, cut, try to sew it, see errors in the initial design, tweak, and try again. 

Sometimes, all that work yields fruit; sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it yields fruit much later. For instance, the best seller from our 2025 collection, KUA, was supposed to drop in 2024 but we simply couldn’t hack it then. We revisited a year later and boom. Designing is ridiculously expensive and can be gratifying or frustrating, but that’s the game.

Running a business comes with wins and days when things don’t go as planned. How have you learnt to separate a difficult business day for RÍRÁN from feeling like you’ve failed as an entrepreneur?

Therapy! I think it’s very difficult to dissociate from something you have built and grown from scratch. Its losses are yours. Its wins, not so much, because everyone else worked to make it happen.

On the rough days, I try to remember that we have gone through so much and we have come out better and stronger, and I put measures in place to ensure we aren’t in that situation again; then I have a lie-down.

After almost a decade of building RÍRÁN, what still feels unfinished? Is there something you want the brand to become that you haven’t figured out yet?

RÍRÁN isn’t a decade yet, not even close, and there’s still so much to do; we have so many rungs left on the ladder, from proper scaling to refining our marketing, fashion shows, etc.

We’re incredibly grateful for how far we have come, but as the tech bros say, this is day one.

🔪 THE PEEL

Is art allowed to be subjective anymore?

The discourse

Some films hand you a meaning and ask you to accept it. Others hand you a set of images and trust you to do something with them. Akinola Davies Jr.’s film My Father's Shadow is very deliberately the second kind of film. It was the first Nigerian feature selected for Cannes’ Official Selection, where it received a Caméra d'Or Special Mention, and later won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut.

This week, it landed on Netflix across Africa, putting it in front of a much wider Nigerian audience. And that choice is being put to the test in real time, in tweets and comment sections across the country. Some viewers read the sequence as a child's dream, a boy's imagination reaching for a father he lost. Others have read it through a specifically Yoruba spiritual framework, as akudaaya, a dead person returning briefly to complete unfinished business.

What's been more striking than the interpretations themselves is how some viewers have responded to the fact that other people arrived somewhere different. This conversation has now become about how we struggle to allow different meanings from the same work to coexist, and how art loses something when we treat one interpretation as the definitive one.

Peeling it back

Let’s start with what the film is actually built to do, because this isn't simply a case of a straightforward story getting misread. Ambiguity is part of the film's language.

The film opens with the idea that its young protagonist will see his father again “in dreams.” Later, Davies describes dreams as a kind of portal and says the film was designed to lead audiences through “breadcrumbs” into a subconscious way of thinking.

The director has also explained that the story grew from memories of a father he and his brother barely knew, memories whose own status was uncertain: they could have been a dream, a fabrication, or something someone had told them.

Davies has even said that the filmmakers wanted to avoid a clean picture because life itself doesn't always offer finite outcomes or neat closure. In another interview, he described the audience as active participants and argued that tying everything up can end the conversation a film creates.

Diverse interpretations are not necessarily a failure to understand the film. This is where we have to make an important distinction. Not every interpretation of a piece of art is automatically equally convincing. A reading can contradict what the work actually establishes or simply have little evidence behind it.

Another layer

This impulse isn't limited to audiences arguing among themselves. There has also been a strand of commentary from people within the film industry suggesting that the “average Nigerian” may simply not understand the film's innuendos or layers.

That framing can feel unnecessarily condescending when people are clearly engaging with the work, asking questions, debating scenes, and trying to make sense of what they have watched.

On Twitter, some Nigerians have also questioned how Nigerian the film feels, with some suggesting that it is obvious it was made by someone who wasn't raised in Nigeria. That opens up another conversation around class, cultural proximity, and who gets to decide what an authentic Nigerian story should look and feel like.

The audience deserves some grace. Understanding a film doesn't have to happen in one sitting. Someone might watch My Father's Shadow today and leave confused, discuss it with someone tomorrow, revisit a scene next week and suddenly see something they missed the first time.

The fact that people are taking their time with the film, talking about it and returning to its questions is not evidence that they are incapable of understanding it. It is evidence that the film has given them something to think about.

The reactions show how differently the film is landing. Some viewers see the lingering sorrow of great African literature and its reflection of Nigeria’s unresolved problems. For those who remember the hope surrounding MKO Abiola and the end of military rule, the film’s portrayal of a country waiting for change still feels familiar decades later.

The Core

We often talk about interpretation as though the goal of watching a film is to solve it. What if it isn't?

What if the value is partly in what happens between the film and everyone who encounters it: the argument with your friend, the explanation you didn't think of, the scene you return to, the cultural reference another viewer catches that you missed, or even the interpretation you disagree with but can suddenly understand after someone explains where it came from? 

Art does not become less intelligent because audiences arrive at different meanings. And an audience does not become less intelligent because it needs time to arrive at one. Maybe the real loss happens when we turn interpretation into a test, where someone has to prove they understood the work before they're allowed to have an opinion about it. 

A film can give us the same image and leave us with completely different feelings. We don't always have to agree on what we saw. Sometimes, the conversation is the point.

🎵 PRESSED BY THE JUICE

Your favorite artists are back with new music. On this week’s playlist, Rema teams up with Tiakola, Young Jonn drops his third EP, while Tomi Thomas, LOVN, and more bring fresh sounds to your ears this week.

Save your favorites, as New Music Box💿 is updated every Friday! 

Do you have a song you’d like us to include? Put us on; reply here.