Chukwudubem Ukaigwe - Catriona Jeffries

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe (b. 1995, Lagos; lives/works Toronto) 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); AMG Projects (Lagos, 2022); Videopool (Winnipeg, 2022); and Flux Gallery (Winnipeg, 2019); with group exhibitions at 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, Akimbo, and Toned Magazine, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. He holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and was the 2020 recipient of the Scott Leroux Fund for Media Arts Exploration. Ukaigwe is a founding member of the Winnipeg-based curatorial group Patterns Collective.