Kosisochukwu Nnebe featured in C Magazine

an inheritance by Kosisochukwu Nnebe with Text
by Nya Lewis in C Magazine’s ‘Grief’ Issue 151

Excerpt of the text by Nya Lewis (link to full text at C Magazine website)

an inheritance depicts a step-by-step process for producing the cassava poison. Employing visual performance, image making, and narrative text, the vignette subtly reveals a dynamic interplay of retaliation and monotonous regularity. Cut, peel, grate, wring, putrefy, harvest, dry, powder, and load. The subject packs the cassava under their thumbnail. Historically, the poison from cassava was transferred from the thumbnail to the drink or meal of the person being poisoned. The insinuated performance ending functions as a phantom mark of exacerbation, and a defiant articulation of rage, memorializing the significance of the silent threat. In a world where Black and African people are incentivized to suppress rage, Nnebe captures an instance of “simmering rage” as a catalyst to reclaim Black emotional subjectivity. She manipulates grief as a legible and edifying practice of retribution. an inheritance asks us: in what ways must our rage be deliberately hidden, veiled, and choked down? In what ways can embracing this rage destroy those things which no longer (and never did) serve us and point us toward alternative courses of action, ones that create new possibilities for living?

Nnebe will continue to explore the themes of this project in the exhibition Brown Butter at the Agnes Etherington June 3rd to July 10th 2022.

About the Author

Nya Lewis’s hybrid interdisciplinary practice is a culmination of centuries of resistance, questions, and actions rooted in the theorization of Black cultural production. She is an MFA candidate, the year-round programmer at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, a Research Assistant at the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, and an independent curator currently serving as Guest Curator at UBC Museum of Anthropology and grunt gallery.