Kosisochukwu Nnebe (b. 1993, Nigeria) is a neurodivergent Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Her practice draws on and critically interrogates her academic training in economics and development, as well as her professional experience in social, economic, and environmental policy within the Canadian government. These experiences inform her focus on anti-imperial worldbuilding through acts of solidarity—human and otherwise—and speculative reimaginings of pasts, presents, and futures.
The works open onto the everyday—foodways, nail salons, native languages—as sites through which memory, knowledge, and power are embedded and quietly circulate. From these vernacular forms and infrastructures, Nnebe constructs counter-archives that trace how the wounds and logics of imperialism have been, and might yet be, subverted and repurposed toward new ends[i]. What emerges are transgressive [ii] understandings of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.
Through structured spatial encounters and coded visual forms, Nnebe’s installations foreground the viewer’s body and position in space—not as detached observer, but as complicit, entangled, and crashing into the very systems the work exposes. In a reversal of power, the works impose their own conditions for comprehensibility[iii]; Black women’s emotional lives, labour, and knowledge emerge not as subjects to be deciphered, but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible.
Beyond this and rooted in her work in social and economic policy, Nnebe’s practice reaches toward the material: fostering coalition between differently colonized peoples and using existing channels for the circulation of capital—within and beyond the arts—to redistribute resources as a means of restitution and reparations.
[i] (here I’m inspired by Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s notion of potential history).
[ii] (I’m thinking of transgression from the perspective of bell hooks, and particularly her conceptualisation of a transgressive “radical black subjectivity” )
[iii] (I see this as a riposte to what Miranda Fricker defines as hermeneutical injustice)
TL;DR : Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Nnebe’s practice mobilizes vernacular forms and everyday infrastructures—foodways, nail salons, native languages—to construct counter-archives of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.
In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, her work demonstrates how social positionings shape regimes of perception and legibility. Cutting across installation, sculpture and lens-based media, they establish their own conditions for legibility: Black women’s emotional lives, labour, and knowledge emerge not as subjects to be deciphered but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible.
Nnebe is a 2025 alumna of the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands; a 2023 Awardee of the G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA in Lagos, Nigeria; and was nominated for and selected as a 2024 Artist-in-Residence with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) at El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space founded by Jorge M. Perez in Miami.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions internationally, including the Vietnam Center for Contemporary Art, Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane (French Guiana), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), UNFAIR Amsterdam, the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), the Tolhuistuin Centre (Amsterdam), NADA New York, the Bowling Green State University Gallery (Bowling Green, Ohio), Green Space (Miami), Hausen Gallery (New York City), the Mohr Gallery at Stanford University (Stanford, California), the Art Museum of Toronto, Art Toronto, Critical Distance Centre for Curators (Toronto), the NIA Centre (Toronto), the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Galerie de l’Université du Québec à Montréal et a l’Outaouais (Montreal and Hull), Optica Gallery (Montreal), Centre Clark (Montreal), articule (Montreal), Plural (Montreal), the Warren G. Flowers Gallery (Montreal), the Ottawa Art Gallery, the School for Photographic Arts (Ottawa), AXENEO7 (Hull), the Foreman Gallery at the University of Sherbrooke, Gallery Gachet (Vancouver), Artspeak (Vancouver), Richmond Gallery (Richmond, BC), Plug in ICA (Winnipeg), The Bows (Calgary), the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Robert McGlaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston).
Nnebe has been commissioned for public art by Plug In ICA and digital art by the Mozilla Foundation, and is the recipient of numerous grants at the national and provincial levels. Institutional acquisitions include KADIST International, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Montreal Roundtable for Black History Month, in addition to private collections in Canada, the United States and Nigeria.
Her work has been featured in arts and media publications internationally including: NO NIIN Magazine (Finland), Metropolis Magazine (Netherlands), The Guardian (UK), Contemporary And and Contemporary And Latin America (Germany/Kenya), Sugarcane Magazine (US), Arts.Black (US), CBC (Canada), Canadian Art Magazine (Canada), C Magazine (Canada), the Power Plant’s In/Tension Podcast (Canada), Akimbo (Canada), Esse (Canada), Vie des Arts (Canada), the Agnes Etherington’s With Opened Mouths Podcast (Canada), Studio Magazine (Canada), Herizons Magazine (Canada), Femme Art Review (Canada), Peripheral Review (Canada), Newest Magazine (Canada), Ornamentum Magazine (Canada) and Range Magazine (Canada).
Nnebe is regularly invited to give presentations about her artistic research at universities and art centres across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Her writing has been commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, the Department of Love: Love Letters, Disembodied Territories (UK) and Artexte (Montreal). Two of her essays about her practice and research are set to be included in forthcoming book publications. In 2021, Nnebe designed and taught a course on Art and Criticism from a critical and decolonial perspective for the Ottawa School of Art’s Fine Arts Diploma Program.
Nnebe is based between Canada, the Netherlands and Nigeria.
An up-to-date artist CV can be found here.