Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Lives and works in Ottawa, ON, Canada

Artist statement

Kosisochukwu Nnebe (b. 1993, Nigeria) is a neurodivergent Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Her practice draws on and critically interrogates her academic training in economics and development, as well as her professional experience in social, economic, and environmental policy within the Canadian government. These experiences inform her focus on anti-imperial worldbuilding through acts of solidarity—human and otherwise—and speculative reimaginings of pasts, presents, and futures. The works open onto the everyday—foodways, nail salons, native languages—as sites through which memory, knowledge, and power are embedded and quietly circulate. From these vernacular forms and infrastructures, Nnebe constructs counter-archives that trace how the wounds and logics of imperialism have been, and might yet be, subverted and repurposed toward new ends. What emerges are transgressive understandings of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality. Plants become vectors for connection and knowledge transmission between differently colonized peoples, sidelining the colonizer. Beauty and adornment are imbued with spiritual and moral meaning and figure in gendered modes of dissent that transform feminized labour and aesthetics into tools of resistance. Existing channels for the circulation of capital - both within and outside the arts - become the means for the redistribution of resources as a form of mutual aid and reparations. Through structured spatial...

Artwork