“the explosion will not happen today”
Held together tenuously and suspended in thin air, the fragments of the artist’s body are pieced together following the explosion — Nnebe’s visual and visceral depiction of the process of racialization (see “I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable”, 2019). At times fading into the background of the space and at other times reflecting it and the viewers back to themselves, the use of mirrored acrylic and steel speak to race as projection and mirror; as a haunting and a shadow; and as a resource both resilient and fragile. Defying easy categorization, race and Blackness are shown to be what we make of them.
Key words: Fanon; Black visibility; opacity; extractive economies; racial capitalism; fungibility; trickster; steel; intersubjectivity; Black spatiality
Fragments of a different self, 2023, steel, two-way mirrored acrylic and 3D printed PLA, installation at The Bows, Calgary
Fragments of a different self, 2023, 3D printed PLA, installation at The Bows, Calgary