Getting Over The Bliss of Ignorance

Of recent installation Art has become an excuse to collate a varied assortment of something old, new, borrowed and sometimes smelly. These collections are cunningly displayed in a gallery space and given some bogus title! Thus, a breath of fresh air is the exuberant feeling one gets when Nkechi Nwosu-Igbo’s current work IMPLIED WALLS goes on display this month at the National Museum. This artist brings together installation, painting, sculpture, text, sound and photography to investigate learning patterns and illiteracy in Nigeria. This show is sated with similes that are cleverly left in the works for the viewer to take away as homework.
Nwosu-Igbo’s staying power as an artist lies in self-invention, and her ability to make ordinary everyday things appear solemn and loaded with meanings. Maybe it is the humour and intense energy contained in her art that truthfully speak to her audience: whether in her writings, paintings, photography or installations, Nwosu-Igbo has produced work that has made us all stop in our tracks and quite occasionally laugh out loud. Our fascination and admiration for this artist’s work must be for the way she makes us question our lack of participation in reinventing both our personal and national realities.
Each installation is titled after an architectural technique or fitting. Aside from literally establishing a link to all the works, the artist also presents education and learning as basic solid structure upon which every other virtue may be added.
The center of the gallery is compelled to accommodate a large rubber pool of water with a yellow telephone set and three photos floating in it. This is surrounded by open old books propped up on rocks and lots of neatly folded clothes. This work, Implied Walls, references the abusive restrictions of illiteracy.
The installation, Reflective Ceiling, presents an optimistic commentary on the spatial environs occupied by Nigeria’s learned and unlearned.
In another work, hundreds of unframed prints of a missing person poster cover nearly the entire west wing walls of the gallery. The seductiveness of playing ignorant to the plight of public schools and the disturbing situation of lack of reading culture in our schools are the prevailing themes of this work titled Border Wall.
In the work Sliding Partition, Nwosu-Igbo, with the assistance of her audience, investigate the glaring percentage of illiteracy in Nigeria .This installation impulsively becomes a happening as the artist invites us to take part in a poll. In this piece, latex hand gloves are inflated with text written on them to spell out different learning disorders like Attention Deficit Disorders ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, Reading difficulties and Speech disorders. At the side is a painting that has on it the word: “READ” boldly written in a crossword puzzle layout. Below these stands a high chair with an open visitor’s jotter in which the viewer is invited to participate by answering some questions.
This exhibition features two more displays titled Daylight Fixtures and Frameless Windows and it is through the shift in perspective, between literacy and illiteracy, that Implied Walls locates much of its meaning. Nwosu-Igbo’s recent offering stages a visual euphemistic presentation that will stay with us much longer than we anticipated.
It is with pleasure that The Edge Studio and Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA) present Nkechi Nwosu-Igbo’s Implied walls, a fusion of motion, sound, performance, text, sculpture, photography, installations and paintings.
dates: 14 - 17 september