Artist: Dozie Kanu
Exhibition title: Cordyceps Gaud Adversary
Curated by: Moritz Scheper
Venue: Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany
Date: September 17 – November 27, 2022
Photography: ©All images copyright the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein
The work of American artist Dozie Kanu is invested in a deeper engagement with material culture and its relation to the African diaspora. Fundamental to his sculptural practice is the observation that black people, particularly black Americans, generally mobilize and excel through forms of expression which require minimal material expenditure. Kanu’s works problematize this dematerialization central to black forms of expression, but also seek to contribute to a discussion of a new black material culture in which experiences of colonialism and violence are already inscribed.
The exhibition “Cordyceps Gaud Adversary” places a strong focus on Kanu’s efforts to undo the immobilization associated with art objects. Through a stage display, all of his sculptures are involved in a scene whose plot is left undefined. The objects’ slippery status, somewhere between prop and actor, jolts the works from their dormant, accumulative order. Kanu further reinforces this tendency via the processing of discarded materials and functional values, each of which provides the objects with possible historical reference points while massively enriching their symbolic and fictional potential. More generally, Kanu intends an allusion to possible use values or the support of certain functions of objects, without excluding other possible oscillating forms of the objects. Underpinning this singular sculptural practice is the latently aggressive tension between the interrelated topoi of ‘labor’ and ‘property’ that is articulated in each of Dozie Kanu’s works.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung within the framework of the Förderpreis Kataloge für junge Künstler:innen.
Dozie Kanu (*1993, US) lives and works in Santarém, Portugal. He studied at the School of Visual Arts, NY and recently had rsolo exhibitions at Performance Space, New York; Project Native Informant, London (both 2022); Manual Arts, Los Angeles; Madragoa, Lisbon (both 2021) and various participations in international group exhibitions.
