Conversation With Ndidi Dike

Featured Work:

I.Ndidi Dike, A Bend in the River II, detail, Sonsbeek, 2020-24

II. Ndidi Dike, Panoramic Meditation On Trade, Capitalism and Dispossession, 2020-21, exhibited in Working through an Impasse, Art Twenty One, Lagos

III. Ndidi Dike, Trace: Transactional Aesthetics, exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, 2019

Ndidi Dike is a renowned contemporary artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. Although trained as a painter at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, she became a self-taught sculptor after years of transgressive sculptural practice. Over the decades, her work has evolved into a multidimensional and multimedia practice defined by experimental processes in photography, collage and video and critical interrogation of materials and ideas. Her long-term research projects deeply engage global histories by using potent metaphors and symbolic objects to address the history of slavery, forced migration, displacement, memory, gender, inequality, remembrance, marginalization, natural resource extraction industries, consumerism, commodification, postcolonial history and legacies and contemporary politics.

Dike has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and been awarded many prestigious local and international artist residencies and commissions over the course of her career. These include Ragdale Foundation for The Arts (Lake Forest, IL), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (United Kingdom), TENQ, Senegal (Africa ’95), Gasworks Studio (London), Graz (Austria), Jogja Biennale XIII: Hacking Conflict, Indonesia Meets Nigeria (Yogjakarta, Indonesia), Bakassi Peninsular Art Residency, an artistic intervention fostering peace and unity in the fishing communities of Limbe and Tiko-Edinao (Cameroon), Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth, Germany), Pernod Ricard fellow Villa Vasslieff (Paris) and Konstepidemin (Sweden). Her participation in international exhibitions has been extensive.