1-4. We Have The Cure, 2024, acrylic, steel, neon signs, ready-made manicure table, video installation (9min), dimensions variable
5-7, The Seeds We Carry, 2024, cast and hand-blown glass, sequins, beads
5,8, ihe anyi hapuru, 2024, solid bronze, beads, ready-made furniture, Dutch-wax cloth
9-10, An inheritance / a threat / a haunting, 2022, video installation, dimensions varaible,
11-14, POS Available Here, 2025, wall-scultpure, standing sculpture, radio, two-channel video installation, vinyl print
15-18, ”Guaranteed Nigerian Adire - Available By The Yard!”, 2025, indigo-dyed cotton, ready-made iron fabric rack, custom sticker, 165 x 170 x 70cm
Photo credit: LF Documentation
Visual Arts Centre of Clarington
January 31 - June 2, 2026
Curated by:
Megan Kammerer and Samantha Lance
“In the beginning, there was a root. Cassava, which originated in South America and the Caribbean before becoming central to West African foodways, is now a staple in Nigerian cuisine. This starchy vegetable must be carefully prepared to remove cyanide toxins from its flesh. The root has been pulled from the earth for generations by women who knew its dual nature—food and poison, sustenance and sabotage. Records tell us that some enslaved Black women hid traces of the root beneath their fingernails, carrying a quiet insurgency in the smallest crease of the body. With each chore of service, each gesture of labour, these women courted the possibility of revolt. Their hands became sites of strategy: nail beds as thresholds between survival and refusal, protection and empowerment.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s We Have The Cure is a multimedia installation that extends from the wake of this sisterhood. It asks what becomes of this ancestral tactic—this poison feminism—as it travels across oceans, centuries, plantations, marketplaces, and digital economies. What remains at the fingertips of women today, and how do their hands continue to engineer liberation in a world structured against their flourishing? As Nnebe extends the cosmology of her previous work in The Seeds We Carry (2024), her textile, video and sculptural installations trace a lineage of uncompromising Black feminist innovation: from cassava hidden under fingernails to adire cloth dyed in courtyards; from historical rebellion in plantation kitchens to contemporary credit cards tapped on Point-of-Sale terminals that connect buyers in North America and Europe directly to market women in Nigeria.
In Lagos, women build their own micro-economies from scratch –crafting adire cloth in dye pits or providing access to cash in market stalls – while navigating conditions that consistently deny them financial stability. In North America, nail salon technicians create similar sites of freedom, expression, and autonomy. Their labour in each case is creative, entrepreneurial, and political. How can we learn from these ongoing traditions to uplift new avenues for community-building, and emancipation? The cure has always been in our hands—with dye-stained palms, lacquered nails, fingers that continually make, resist, and reimagine. Liberation is not a distant horizon but a practice already pulsing, ready for action, at our fingertips.” - Megan Kammerer, Curator
Exhibition Catalogue: