2024 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence at El Espacio 23

WOPHA / 03.17.2024

2024 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence: Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Kosisochukwu Nnebe
Dates: March 1 – 31, 2024
Location: El Espacio 23. 2270 NW 23rd St, Miami, FL 33142
Public Programming: Open Studio. March 15, 2024, at El Espacio 23 and artist talk moderated by Amanda Bradley.

About Artists

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, curator, and writer whose practice draws inspiration from postcolonial and Black feminist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, bell hooks, and Sylvia Wynter. Working across installation, lens-based media, and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics that range from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. At its core, Nnebe’s practice is interested in anti-colonial and -imperial world-building through acts of solidarity (human and otherwise), the troubling of colonial logics, and speculative (re)imaginings of otherwise pasts, presents and futures. Nnebe’s work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada and internationally, including the Montreal Museum of Arts, Plug In ICA, the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Optica Gallery, the Hausen Gallery in NYC, and Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam, with forthcoming exhibitions at the Art Museum of Toronto, SAW Centre, and the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery in Ohio. She is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria, was one of two inaugural artists for NLS Kingston’s Sustainable Sculpture Residency in Maroon Town, Jamaica, and has been commissioned by Plug In ICA and the Mozilla Foundation.

Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation, place, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Lightwork Syracuse, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures Generation Gallery, and Baxter Street CCNY. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Stoneleaf, Baxter Street CCNY, BRIC Workspace, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Transition, Nueva Luz, Small Axe, Oxford American, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at the International Center of Photography and Parsons School of Design in New York.

About Cultural Partner

El Espacio 23 is a contemporary art space founded by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez. Located within a repurposed 28,000-square-foot warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, El Espacio 23 serves artists, curators, and the general public with regular exhibitions, residencies, and a variety of special projects drawn from the Pérez Collection.