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.
“Guaranteed Nigerian Adire - Available by the Yard!” is a project rooted in Nigerian understandings of the signficiance and role of textiles, garments and adornment as tools of communication, storytelling and connection. But it is also a body of work that seeks to excavate gendered forms of anticolonial resistance in Nigeria and locate them within a geneology of dissent that also includes acts of refusal on the part of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and South America.
For this body of work, Nnebe adapts the traditional process of tie-dye with Indigo (adire in Yoruba) to produce what she calls adire or tie-dye photographs. She then uses this technique to develop archival images highlighting the use of traditional clothing – specifically the wrapper – as a tool of protest in both the 1949 Abeokuta and 1929 Aba Women’s Wars. That the images are reproduced on segments of fabric long enough to make a wrapper serves as an indiciation of the next step of the project: to keep these histories alive through activation and continued protest.
1-5. Performance at Unfair Amsterdam’s De Kerk, 2025, (photo by Almicheal Fraay)
For her second design, Nnebe turns the process of indigo dyeing into a performance and methodology for making visible the sediments of colonial history we've been taught to forget. Here, she examines the origins of the cassava used in textile production in Nigeria, revealing connections between Nigerians and the Tainos— indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and South America - rooted in the transmission of Indigenous knowledge."
The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.