Ottawa-based contemporary art gallery Studio Sixty Six hosted a dialogue on women of colour in the arts titled Hyper/in/visibility on Oct. 5. The art show highlighted the works of two Canadian artists, Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Pansee Atta, and the lived experiences behind Nnebe’s work.
Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist whose work aims to combine critical theory and visual arts practice and explores the world of art as an interactive and destructive force. Atta, on the other hand, is an emerging Egyptian-Canadian artist who typically practices collaborative and community-based art. Her work explores themes of colonization, feminism, and Muslim representation, including the role of Canadian cultural institutions in legacies of dehumanization.
One of Nnebe’s topics of discussion was how her work explores the external process of racialization including Blackness and being ‘Othered.’ She said she’s interested in how it impacts the way we live our lives, as it intricately relates to our subjectivity and how we relate to ourselves.
She also acknowledged the intended audience for her art work being both Black and white people and talked about female Black representation as artists and in art.
“This show is for Black people, and for Black women in particular. It really is for us, by us,” Nnebe said. “There’s this total absence of Black womanhood in terms of not only representations of Black women in art institutions, especially in Ottawa, Ontario, and in Canada–not only representations, but also having space for Black female artists.”
In terms of lived experience, Nnebe speaks on the discomfort of being a Black woman facing the heavy white representation in the world of art.
“There’s always this discomfort at all times,” she said. “That’s what Hyper/in/visibility speaks to, so for me, in having access to the world of art there has to be the ability to bring my lived experience into it and not shy away from that which might make other people uncomfortable, especially white people.”
Nnebe also talked about the representation of Black women in the media in relation to her work, which is a response to media stereotyping.
“There is this need, given the lack of representation, and at times when you are represented, it’s not in a way that you want. And there’s this frustration towards those images, so I felt as if I had to come in and fill that space with images that were positive,” Nnebe said.
She said that she did not; however, find this approach helpful at the end of the day, and decided to take a more realistic route that is rooted in her lived experience as a Black woman.
“It’s a totally different emphasis, in terms of what has pushed me to create now versus then, and that’s personal progression. And that’s saying, ‘you know what, it’s all good, I’m not mad at anyone, there’s no issue and we can all be out here’ and there’s no longer that respectability politics,” Nnebe said.
Her appreciation for both forms of work, in her past and present, is strong, but she said that it is no longer enough for her, and she wishes to further question race and people’s experiences surrounding it.
