1-3, 5. Installation and detail views from Unfair Amsterdam’s De Kerk, 2025, indigo-dyed cotton, ready-made iron fabric rack, custom sticker, 165 x 170 x 70cm (photos by artist)
4. Photo by Almicheal Fraay.
For Guaranteed Nigerian Adire, a series of indigo textile works (not cyanotypes), Nnebe develops archival photographs by adapting the traditional Yoruba indigo-dyeing practice of adire eleko.
Rooted in her years-long research into cassava, the works serve to demonstrate that the craft is inseparable from the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and colonial violence in South America and the Caribbean; the cassava used in the production of the textiles arrived on the shores of West Africa aboard Portuguese slaveships departing what is now Brazil.
Using cassava as bridge, Nnebe connects the seemingly disparate histories of resistance of the Yoruba women who protested colonial economic policies as part of the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt of 1947 with the use of cassava as poison among both enslaved and Indigenous peoples in places like Jamaica as the ultimate form of anti-colonial dissent.
Through performance, Nnebe turns the process of indigo dyeing into a methodology for making visible the sediments of colonial history we've been taught to forget. Through both her body and labour, she engages in a choreographed rhythm that reveals connections between Nigerians and the Tainos — indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and South America — rooted in the transmission of Indigenous knowledge.
In these works, materiality (cassava, cotton, indigo) combine with method (adire, a technique developed by Yoruba women, including in centres of production such as Abeokuta) to offer an alternative reading of archival materials, grounding them in a novel understanding of kinship that connects the labour and knowledge of Black and Indigenous women across the Atlantic.
1-5. Performance at Unfair Amsterdam’s De Kerk, 2025, (photo by Almicheal Fraay)
Guaranteed Nigerian Àdìrẹ IV (Atabey and Yucahu), 2026, indigo-dyed cotton,
28.75 in x 51.5 in. x 1.75 in. (framed) (73.02 x 130.81 x 4.45 cm (framed))
Guaranteed Nigerian Àdìrẹ III (matapee), 2026, indigo-dyed cotton,
27 in. x 32.5 in. x 1.75 in. (framed) (68.58 x 82.55 x 4.45 cm (framed))
Photo credit: LF Documentation