Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, curator and writer whose practice draws inspiration from postcolonial and Black feminist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, bell hooks, and Sylvia Wynter. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics that range 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, Nnebe’s practice is interested in anti-colonial and -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.
A self-taught artist, Nnebe’s educational background in economics and sociology from McGill University and the London School of Economics, as well as professional background in social policy through her work with the Canadian federal government both inform her approach to her art practice, which is research-based and geared toward social change. Her curatorial practice focuses on anti-colonial solidarities and alternative readings of colonial histories through the lens of racial capitalism and ecology.
Nnebe’s work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), The Nia Centre for the Arts (Toronto), the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre (Kingston), Optica Gallery (Montreal), ArtSpeak (Vancouver), AXENEO7 (Hull), the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), as well as the Hausen Gallery in New York City, the Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California, and Tolhuistuin Cultural Centre in Amsterdam. She has forthcoming exhibitions at the Art Museum of Toronto, SAW Centre in Ottawa, and the Bowling Green State University Gallery in Ohio. She recently participated in a residency at El Espacio 23 in Miami, in collaboration with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA); is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria; and was one of two inaugural artists for NLS Kingston’s Sustainable Sculpture Residency in Maroon Town, Jamaica. Nnebe has been commmissioned for public art by Plug In ICA; digital art by the Mozilla Foundation, and writing by the Department of Love, the National Gallery of Canada, Disembodied Territories (UK) and Artexte (Montreal). In 2021, she designed and delivered a course on Art and Criticism from a critical and decolonial perspective for the Ottawa School of Art’s Fine Arts Diploma Program.