G.A.S. Foundation is thrilled to invite you to a virtual conversation with 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship recipient and forthcoming resident Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and distinguished Ghanian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, taking place in the context of The Seeds We Carry, Nnebe’s latest solo exhibition at the SAW Centre in Ottawa, Canada, curated by Joséphine Denis. This event is co-presented by the SAW Centre, Black Artists Network and Dialogue (BAND), the G.A.S. Foundation and the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, and promises to be a profound exploration of site-specific and process-oriented art practices by two contemporary African artists and their impact on communities.
Join us for an enriching discussion where Nnebe and Mahama will explore their respective art practices and the social dynamics and impacts that drive them. The conversation will delve into their focus on materiality—jute for Mahama and food for Nnebe—in uncovering colonial histories, as well as their innovative use of space to create community-centric art experiences. This event will offer deep insights into artistic expressions as spaces of transformation.
Event Details
Title: Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Ibrahim Mahama in Conversation
Date: Saturday 27th July, 2024
Time: 6:00 - 7:00pm (West African Time)
Venue: Virtual
The Seeds We Carry is a solo exhibition by Nigerian-Canadian artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe curated by Joséphine Denis at the SAW Centre in Ottawa, Canada. The exhibition explores how enslaved women in the Caribbean used plant life to navigate the realities of life under slavery, from using cassava to poison slave masters to making a paste out of sugar apple seeds to terminate pregnancies. Drawing connections between plant knowledge and spirituality, and between the Caribbean and West Africa, the exhibition centres black women and the gendered methods of resistance they used.
The Seeds We Carry employs Nnebe’s methodology of using food as counter-archives of colonial histories. Where official archives bring about issues of accessibility and power, Nnebe turns to common foodstuffs to open up alternative approaches to memory-making with which to re-write history.
Honouring food as a cornerstone of liberation, the exhibition includes the construction of a community food pantry in downtown Ottawa in partnership with Prof. Menna Agha at the Carleton School of Architecture. At the close of the exhibition, the pantry will be relocated to a local community where it will continue to function as a testament to aliveness against overwhelming odds and, in the words of Denis, the “ingenuity of Black collective existence.”
About the Artists
Kosisochukwu Nnebe
Born in Nigeria and raised in Canada, Nnebe is a conceptual artist, researcher, and writer, with an educational and professional background in economics and social and environmental policy. Working across installation, lens-based media, and sculpture, she 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. At its core, her practice is interested in anti-imperial world-building through acts of solidarity (human and otherwise), the troubling of colonial logics, and speculative (re)imaginings of otherwise pasts, presents, and futures.
Nnebe’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Bowling Green State University Gallery in Ohio and Fonderie Darling in Montreal. She has participated in residencies in Miami with El Espacio 23 and WOPHA, Maroon Town, Jamaica with NLS Kingston, and is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Nigeria. In 2025, Nnebe will join a small cohort of artists, designers, and researchers for a year-long residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Her writings on her artistic research will appear in two forthcoming book publications.
Ibrahim Mahama
Born and now residing in Tamale, Ghana, Mahama is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and textiles. He is best known for his vast and ambitious interventions in public spaces, using jute sacks to address systems of value, global commerce, and the detritus of colonialism. Mahama’s most recent commission involved wrapping London’s Barbican Centre in 2,000 square meters of handwoven cloth. In 2024, Mahama received the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the Dia Art Foundation for the complexity, scale, and responsiveness of his work.
Mahama’s solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany (2023); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2022); Frac Pays de la Loire (2022); The High Line, New York (2021); and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020). He has participated in group exhibitions such as Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); 18th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2023); the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Documenta 14; and the 56th and 58th Venice Biennale.
Mahama is the founder of Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Nkrumah Volini, which he created to offer spaces for interrogation and artistic (ex)change in northern Ghana.