Kosisochukwu Nnebe
© I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable, Guy L’Heureux, 2023.
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable
September 15, 2023 - October 28, 2023
Opening Friday September 15, 2023
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable is an exploration of visibility in relation to the artist’s own body and lived experience. The first room calls into question the objectivity of perception, highlighting the manner in which one’s position in society shapes what is seen and unseen. The artist resists any attempt to be seen and known in favour of a politics of refusal. Opacity and transparency feature intermittently in materials that at times obfuscate and at times reveal glimpses into a new way of seeing and being yet to be understood—even by the artist herself.
The second room takes up where the first leaves off, exploring the effects of racialized perception—the projection of race onto the body—on the lived experience of the embodied subject. Embracing the notion of paradox, since what I might be is uncontainable hints at the contradictions of race as a lived reality. The process of racialization—in many ways an act of naming—gives rise to both violence on the basis of difference and a sense of kinship predicated on shared experiences. These contrasting realities are mediated through the body, the center of attention in the installation.
Both rooms call into being the figure of Anansi the spider, a trickster God in Ghanaian folklore, as a way of imagining ways of being that go beyond dichotomy. Floating between the world of the Gods and that of mankind, the trickster offers a model of how to navigate the space in-between fixed identities and seemingly paradoxical realities. Rather than either/or, the trickster offers slippage and concomitance: between moments of agency and vulnerability; violence and protection; hypervisibility and invisibility; absence and presence. To be a trickster is to be uncontainable, unknowable, and potentially free to create oneself anew each day.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist. Inspired by postcolonial theorists Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Nnebe’s practice is invested in unraveling the process of racialization and re-thinking the politics of Black visibility. Moving across installation and lens-based media, Nnebe creates works that shapeshift and transform to reveal a glimpse into new ways of seeing and understanding Blackness. In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, Nnebe’s works root themselves also in Black feminist standpoint theory to demonstrate how one’s positionality within society - as within space - dictates what is seen and unseen, thus engaging viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own complicity. Undergirding Nnebe’s practice is a desire for reconnection and dreams of otherwise Black futurities anchored in non-Western epistemologies and ontologies and anti-colonial solidarities.
Her work has been exhibited across Canada, including Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Kingston, Guelph, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montreal, as well as internationally. Nnebe’s work can be found in public collections, including the Canada Council for the Art’s Art Bank and the Ottawa Art Gallery collection, as well as private collections in Canada, the United States and Nigeria, and she has been commissioned for both public and digital art projects by Plug In ICA and the Mozilla Foundation. Nnebe has spoken about her artistic work and research across the country and was an instructor of Art and Criticism at the Ottawa School of Art.
Exhibition text
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable
By Chloë Lalonde
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian artist with Igbo ancestry (Southeastern Nigeria in West Africa). Having studied economics, international development, inequalities and social sciences, Nnebe is also a policy analyst and community organiser. Artistically, she works with installation and sculpture in a photo-based practice. Nnebe embodies Anansi, part human, part spider, full trickster.
Gail E. Hayley’s A Story, a Story is an illustrated retelling of Anansi’s iconic trick, how he stole stories from the Sky God for everyone here on Earth. In exchange for the Sky God’s stories, Anasi captured three sly creatures as gifts for the Sky God, ultimately allowing beings on Earth to remember their histories and share them with generations to come.
The Ghanaian folktales featuring Anansi spread orally throughout the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Anansi has since become a catalyst, a symbol of resistance transcending Western systems and social norms. The spider is clever, outsmarting adversaries and inspiring new ways of seeing and navigating the world. As a character, he is complex, not good or bad, neither villain nor vigilante, hero or anti-hero. Anansi is opaque; Kosisochukwu Nnebe is too.
Following Édouard Glissant’s definition of opacity, the opaque is that which cannot be reduced nor obscured. In Poetics of Relation Glissant writes, “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics,”¹ solid and whole, not containing layers of transparencies, not a sum of parts, but a whole of entangled relations.
By climbing three steps up the wooden pedestal modelled after slave auction blocks, the viewer is now on display, becoming part of the exhibition, an object for observation rather than observer. By looking through the red plexiglass panels, their vision is changed.
“I have [been] withheld” / “I have withheld”
These words are drawn from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, a published collection of versos, notes written on the back of left-hand pages that were not meant to be shared. Nnebe’s editing of this stanza highlights systemic oppression and continued personal suppression enforced by racial capitalism, yet creates room for agency, room to breathe, room for the Black gaze, for opacity, for saying “nope.”¹ In the other room, Nnebe’s arms reach out to grasp the viewer. Within the web the artist’s limbs sprawl, twirling, basking in the light of audio clips extracted from Marlon Riggs’ 1995 documentary, Black is... Black Ain't, and come together only to hide once again in plain sight.
For Glissant, to grasp (comprendre) means to hold onto, to grab and withhold from another, to which he suggests an alternative gesture: of giving-on-and-with (donner-avec), effectively ensuring the spinning of the web. Nnebe is not reaching out to grasp afterall. Where Brand’s blue clerk guards the pages of absolute truths and reductions, withholding them from the web - Nnebe rebuffs that generalisation and objectification.
Through red, yellow and pink prints of a spider, the artist really does want you to know she is hiding something from you, beyond what you think you see at first glance. With enough time spent on the auction block, within the spider’s web, resisting perception, viewers can complete their arsenal of facts to decipher that which is really being hidden.
Remaining firmly in a web of opacities, Nnebe invites viewers to engage in their own giving-on-and-with, and allowing for the Black gaze to recognize itself, finding refuge in and with Anansi.
¹ Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 204.
² 2015. E.Jane, NOPE (a manifesto)
