Nyama and the Trickster - Kosisochukwu Nnebe

NYAMA AND THE TRICKSTER  

Kosisochukwu Nnebe

October 4-November 10

Opening Reception | October 4, 6-8 p.m.

Artist Talk at 6p.m.

Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery

BGSU Fine Arts Center

Artist Statement

written by Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Nyama and the Trickster is a new solo exhibition by Nigerian-born artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe that traces the history of West African metallurgy - from its beginnings on the continent to its adaptation to the reality of the plantation system in the Caribbean - and finds in it evidence of how efforts to render Blackness into mere raw resource have always been confronted with the irreducibility of Black knowledge, spirituality, and aliveness. Across centuries and generations, spanning oceans and coastlines, Blackness carries within it something intangible that finds its roots outside of Western understandings, a things of catalysis and transmutation capable of creating from the detritus and ruins of the same modernity on whose back it was built. In Nyama and the Trickster, this nyama - a West African, and specifically Mande, name for the energy and force that animates the universe - is rooted in the spirit of the trickster, a figure in West African and Caribbean folklore that, for enslaved peoples, came to represent survival, subversion, and resistance through chaos and creative energy. Shapeshifting into the form of Anansi, the trickster spider in Ghanaian folklore, Nnebe embraces a life giving force that defies easy consumption and instead provides the tools for the creation of new - and transgressive - understandings of Blackness. 

Artist Bio

(provided by the artist)

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist and writer. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics ranging from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. Nnebe's work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Plug in ICA (Winnipeg) and the Art Museum of Toronto, as well as Hausen Gallery in New York, Green Space in Miami, and Tolhuistuin Cultural Centre in Amsterdam. She recently participated in a residency with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) at El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space founded by Jorge M. Perez in Miami; is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria; and was one of two inaugural artists for NLS Kingston's Sustainable Sculpture Residency in Maroon Town, Jamaica. In 2025, she will participate in a year-long residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands.