NADA Miami 2024, Ice Land

EMBODIED POETICS

This presentation illuminates freedom-focused praxes that invite viewers to gather and reconnect with themselves. Drawing upon Sylvia Wynter’s reconceptualisation of ‘sociopoetics’, these sculptural and painterly works attest to the urgency of emancipating from power hierarchies. Adams's use of postcolonial and postmodern feminist theory configures subversive, revolutionary sculptures that welcome liminality and newness. Comparably, Onosowobo’s paintings use familiar, intimate motifs within a specific Nigerian spatiality to invoke reflections on identity and community. Finally, Nnorom’s fabric architectures promote self-interrogation and critical thinking, using these to respond to sociopolitical factors that inform the mundane. These artists invite us to consider the difference between what is given and what is our own.

Adams’s sculptural series explores rest as a radical act of resilience. She considers this practice as essential to Black women and all marginalised and colonised people. Adams’s stoneware visualises her observations of exploitative, migrant histories- how these forcibly shape identity and challenge personal and collective rights to rest and harmony. This being in direct opposition to the fluid Nok sculptures she draws inspiration from. Her contemporary methodology challenges colonial narratives, recontextualising the notion that self-care is political warfare- as cited by cultural theorists like Audre Lorde and bell hooks.

... Onosowobo’s practice discusses everyday Nigerianness using motifs of memory and time. This new body of work presents a painterly dreamscape that poses questions rather than answers. In ‘A Hand on a Shoulder’, the composed, formidable subject contrasts the obscured, barely visible bodies collected in the Lamu background. The viewer’s gaze is coaxed to the clearest object, a calm hand placed on the feminine figure’s shoulder. This limb acts as a gesture of pleasure, which defies the temptation of despair and isolation- imagined as the European pull. Onosowobo sees the shoulder as an everyday part of the body; her fixation on this element calls to her general focus on the nostalgic and ordinary.

Nnorom’s textile, sculptural practices deconstruct various socio-cultural concerns and truths. His work is foregrounded in his use of Dutch wax prints or African print fabric (Ankara) and second-hand clothes (Okirika) predominantly used within his local community and across West Africa. By manipulating these cloths into bubbles, bindles, and lines, he comments on the dynamism of “The Social Fabric”- this being reconstituted according to geopolitical-cultural histories and spaces. In particular, he explodes, ties, and creates parallel lines within his architectural works. Thus, Nnorom suggests a global, quotidian rhetoric stipulating expression and connectivity.

Collectively, these contemporary works craft a necessary poetic that encourages a rounded self-intrigue and sense of being.