Nyama and the Trickster (2024)
From the artist statement: “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 African continent to its arrival on the shores of the Caribbean as part of the slave trade. Looking to the preservation of metallurgical practices and craftsmanship, Nnebe finds evidence of how efforts to render Blackness into mere raw resource have always been confronted with the irreducibility of Black knowledge, spirituality, and aliveness.
In Sweet as Iron (2024), Nnebe creates three sculptures out of wrought iron referencing sugar cane plants and the Black metallurgists whose experience on sugar plantations led to the invention of a process for re-purposing scrap metal into valuable iron bar. With sugar candy gleaming from their tops in the place of flowers, the sculptures tower overhead and feature ornate motifs commonly found in wrought iron fences and gates, including three that have their roots in adinkra symbols originating from Ghana.
In Aunt Nancy (2024), Nnebe presents herself in the form of Anansi, the trickster spider in Ghanaian folklore who came to be known as Aunty Nancy in the folk stories preserved and retold by enslaved peoples in Jamaica and the southern United States. Assuming the shapeshifting powers of the trickster, Nnebe attunes herself to a life-giving force that defies easy consumption and instead provides the tools for the creation of new – and transgressive – understandings of Blackness.
Throughout the gallery, steel cut-outs of the artist’s disembodied limbs shapeshift into impossible configurations, making up the 2023 Fragments of a different self. Here again, there is slippage – this time between steel and the Black body as foundational elements of our modern economic system. The corrosion on the metal speaks at once to the weathering that breaks down metal and Black bodies alike over time, and to the repurposing of scrap by Black communities as forms of cultural and physical survival - from the historic use of steel oil drums to create steel pans in Trinidad and Tobago to the informal floating Makoko settlements in Lagos.
The exhibition is completed by a commissioned soundtrack by Detroit-based harpist Ackeem Salmon that gives voice to this ongoing battle between oppressive conditions and the resoluteness and beauty of Black life and existence”.
Key words: metallurgy, African spirituality, trickster, music, racial capitalism, knowledge, sugar, slavery
Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Fragments of a different self, 2024, steel
Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Sweet as Iron, 2024, wrought iron, sugar, soil, audio
Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Aunt Nancy, 2024, mixed media
Photo credit: Artist and Sarah Thomas
The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.