Chukwudubem Ukaigwe - Catriona Jeffries

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe (b. 1995, Lagos; lives/works Stanford, USA) is an artist, curator, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice is an inquiry into semiotic dissonance. Tapping into a diverse spectrum of influences—from experimental music and literature, to history and futurisms—Ukaigwe approaches his art practice as a double gesture. On one hand, his work is a way of annotating, augmenting, defacing, transposing, and rewriting in the margins of a palimpsestic history. On the other hand, his paintings, installations, and video works are an attempt to assemble and compose a speculative sensorium that permits hearing in a different tempo; one that collapses the subject–object divide and maps out new and revised sociographies. By bringing to center facets of everyday life, Ukaigwe enacts a compositional practice that is fabulated out of the choice to meander in extant modes of being: fugitive, improvised, ongoing and otherwise.

Ukaigwe’s social practice is established on the foundations of splintered or shared authorship, community input, and relativity. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Neutral Ground (Regina, 2023); Artspeak (Vancouver, 2023); Kanbi Projects and AMG Projects (Lagos, 2022); Videopool (Winnipeg, 2022); and Flux Gallery (Winnipeg, 2019). Recent group exhibitions include the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, 2025); Norval Foundation (Cape Town, South Africa, 2025); Winnipeg Art Gallery (2025); Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2024); Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands, 2023); Confederation Centre of the Arts (Charlottetown, 2023, 2022); Dazibao (Montreal, 2022); The Koppel Project (London, 2021, 2020); Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (Winnipeg, 2021); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles, 2021); Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, 2021); ADA Contemporary Art Gallery (Accra, Ghana, 2021); and Or Gallery (Vancouver, 2021). Ukaigwe’s writing has been published in BlackFlash, Public Parking, and Toned Magazine, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. He holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. The artist was shortlisted for the 2025 Sobey Art Award and was the 2020 recipient of the Scott Leroux Fund for Media Arts Exploration.