Revealing softly: Soldier on power, camouflage, and imagining the future

Leonard Iheagwam, known as Soldier, works from lived experience rather than fixed categories. Born in Lagos and now based in London, his practice moves across painting, sculpture, fashion, skate culture, and performance, drawing from personal history, collective memory, and speculative futures. Camouflage, both as pattern and metaphor, has become a form of language in his work, pointing to systems of power, protection, and invisibility that shape everyday life.

For Future Tense, an online exhibition curated by Soldier for MyMA, the artist shifts from making to gathering. Bringing together voices from different geographies and disciplines, the exhibition presents a fragmented, emotional, and shared vision of the future. It also marks a new chapter for MyMA, which for the first time places curatorial agency in the hands of an artist.

In this conversation, Soldier reflects on authority, the tension between authenticity and systems, the role of community, and what it means to imagine a future without pretending to have a single answer.

hube: Much of your work interrogates authority, exclusion, and inherited structures—military, religious, cultural. What drives that impulse to question power, and has its meaning shifted as you’ve grown as an artist?

Soldier: I would say that what drives this impulse is my situation and my understanding that, in life and in this world, there are hierarchies. I was born into a lower-class family in a country without the visa structures that would allow me to travel the world. The effects of colonialism and war have opened my eyes to these power plays and hierarchies, so my lived experiences inform my artistic research.

This view hasn’t necessarily changed, but the older I get, the more aware I become of the power of race, war, family, and relationships, and how all of these play into my work.

h: How do you see the role of the artist in society: observer, critic, or agent of change?

S: I think the role of artists in society comes from all three.

I would say artists act as historians—the work we make is almost a reflection of the current time and moment. Its beauty and aesthetic pleasure are important, but it also shows where that artist is in life. That may be a particular place, culture, or the systems they’re in, and some artists use that reflection as a way to critique culture. You can look to art to see the times and how a particular cultural moment existed.

That’s why I made the body of work Black Star, not necessarily as futurism, but as a vehicle to speculate on the future. Art, for me personally, is both a reflection and a vehicle that can take you from the past and present and bring you into the future. In the same way, art can be used to reflect the timelines we’re living in now, while also looking toward the future.

Art can stir something in other people, create movement, and create change. That’s why I’m excited about this group show with MyMA. I feel like the show encompasses all three things. It’s a critique, an observation, and an agent of change for what the future could hold.