Central Image: Dozie Kanu, “Cordyceps Gaud Adversary”, Installationsansicht, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, © the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

Dozie Kanu is an American artist of Nigerian descent who has achieved significant success in the last eight years. Using found objects and reintroducing them to the public, he creates aesthetically unique sculptures, suspended between stability and instability, functionality and uselessness but also historical reference and latent irony. In his latest works, his origins and his acquaintance with reuse culture, mainly of black artists, intertwine with political issues like the “legalised” racism in Texas and the experience of living your whole life as an immigrant even if you are born on American soil.

Last November, his most recent solo exhibition titled "Cordyceps Gaud Adversary” was completed, characterized as “personal” and indeed it was. Three furniture-like sculptures stand on a makeshift stage as the props of a hypothetical performance that has either been completed or is about to start. The furniture pieces are strange and even if they are easily recognizable, in terms of identity and possible function, they are made in such a way as to appear useless. Each lacks the essential feature that serves its functionality, trapping these works into a mere representation of themselves: a chair without a seat and a back, a table with its surface hanging upside down. An oil can à la Duchamp that can function as a seat appears to be the most functional piece but at the same time the least conventional (!) But the most important things are said "off" stage. Two more pieces of furniture are not on but near the platform. In relation to the rest, they seem to be more descriptive and, so to speak, geographically and temporally determined, underlining the autobiographical nature of this specific exhibition with an emphasis, so to speak, on the artist's obligation to narrate a traumatic social experience.

Dozie Kanu, Chair [xvi], 2022, found steel oil container, found woven stool, steel, © the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

To the right of the stage is a black steel table, with a brass casted ram’s head embedded in it, titled “untitled (Merrill)”. The biblical symbol of the ram is inextricably linked to the landscape of Texas, the artist's birthplace, but also to African culture, while the title reveals the political character of the work, clearly referencing the relatively recent case concerning the company. Merrill Lynch, one of Wall Street's biggest brokerages, agreed to pay $160 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit that lasted eight years before federal courts. The settlement of the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of 700 black former Merrill employees, was the largest amount ever given to plaintiffs in a racial discrimination lawsuit against an American employer.

Dozie Kanu, untitled (Merrill), 2022, found brass casted rams head, acrylic polyurethane enamel paint, steel, anti-climb raptor spikes, epoxy sculpting clay, © the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

To the left of the stage, a work titled "numb + dumb consciousness" remains almost unnoticed, mainly due to its distance from the rest of the objects. It is a sculptural intervention that seems as if it were made by another artist, however, it is directly connected to the narrative of the exhibition. The difference lies mainly in the choice of material but also in the vivid colours. The transparent plastic work is painted with acrylics in the colours of the American flag. Its form evokes the minimalist sculptural tradition of the 60s, the famous works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Frank Stella. The object is a sculptural representation of a “formicarium”, a laboratory container used for the observation of ants, an indirect reference to population movements to America with the sole aim of finding work in a system that brutally discriminates and exploits the ever-renewable labour force.

Dozie Kanu “Cordyceps Gaud Adversary” at Neuer Essener Kunstverein, 2022. © Dozie Kanu / Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

The scenography is impressive because it keeps the installation open to interpretation but at the same time it provides a structured meaning to the latter. The setting at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein highlights Dozie Kanu's penchant for directing, which he first began studying in New York but quickly switched to sculpture and design. The title itself, “Cordyceps Gaud Adversary”, corresponds impressively to the scenography and describes everything the exhibition narrates, much better than the press release text. Cordyceps is a parasitic fungus which attacks ants and “zombifies” them. Gaud means a thing that is purely ornamental and adversary refers to the litigations and American legal system. This clever title, although seemingly incomprehensible, creates subtitles for all three sections/acts of the exhibition, which is nothing more than an autobiographically rendered scathing “j’accuse” against racial discrimination in America and especially in Texas.

Kanu grew up in Texas with Nigerian parents and while he states that he does not want to be a “black artist” but an “artist” the elements of his descent gradually become one with his work, through which he narrates stories of racial oppression.

Dozie Kanu, “Cordyceps Gaud Adversary”, Installationsansicht, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, © the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

It was only in 2018 that he travelled for the first time to Nigeria, where he got to know African handcrafts and realised that the minimalist aesthetics of the Western world, forms that he preferred in his visual practice, are diametrically opposed to that of Africa and this, for Kanu, meant something! He explored it by combining these techniques, which are both parts of his identity, changing his aesthetic approach to his new objects, something that becomes more evident than ever in "Cordyceps Gaud Adversary", with “Chair [xvi]” being the most characteristic example, in which the traditionally colourful painting meets the rough industrial steel in a woven stool (found in Nigeria) and an old oil container.

Dozie Kanu, numb + dumb consciousness, 2022, Acrylic, water absorbing plastic, rubber paint,© the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.

It’s important that the objects don’t represent African culture so as to introduce it to white people, an approach that is often problematic. The artist re-introduces the found objects using them in such a way that the narrative he composes is less about African and more about American culture. A culture which, in the context of the exhibition, is judged as deeply racist. Kanu, through his “empty” performance, manages to broach the racial issue and at the same time criticises himself on how he makes -and used to make- art.

FURTHER READING:

archive.nytimes.com

projectnativeinformant.com

moussemagazine.it

ssense.com

cdn.contemporaryartlibrary.org

contemporaryartlibrary.org