This past week I had the incredible opportunity of participating in a Curatorial Practicum with internationally-renowned artist Bright Ugochukwu Eke, helping him set up his installation in Smith Reading Room in Olin Library. Bright Eke was born in Nigeria, and holds an MFA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. While completing his masters, he developed a skin condition due to acid rainfall in a part of the country (I believe it was around the Niger delta) dominated by oil industries. Returning to campus, Bright Eke began work on a project that consisted of suspending little plastic sachets filled with water and carbon powder from trees, to create a raindrop cluster effect. If I remember correctly, a curator from the Dakar Biennial happened to see his work, and invited him to exhibit that year. Since then, his work has been shown around the world. Bright Eke’s artistic practice develops at the interface of nature and society, foregrounding the ethics and politics of resource distribution and consumption and the fundamental interconnectedness of all life.
This particular exhibition paired symbolic representations of birth (eggs, umbilical cords) with those of time, destruction and deforestation. At the exhibition opening, Bright Eke was telling us that when a baby is born in Nigeria, the umbilical cord is cut, buried in the ground, and a tree is planted on top of it (I don’t know if this varies between regions or ethnic groups). I think he said that this practice evokes a life-sustaining force linking both child and tree.
I feel that I learned a lot from Bright Eke about materials and artistic practice. One of the most prominent lessons was his installation process. Bright Eke likes to gather around him the community he is working within when he installs his pieces, never starting with a preconceived notion of what the installation will look like, but rather developing it through conversation and exchange with the community members who work with him. We just finished reading about intercultural praxis in class, and I feel that art has the potential to unite and elicit the elements described by the intercultural praxis paradigm when practiced as Bright Eke does: it provides the opportunity for inquiring, reframing (literally, situating art within a context foreign to its original conception), initiating dialogue with the community “hosting” the art, and gathering people together to act and assemble the artwork in a way that honors their particular understanding of and reactions to it.
