Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Collage, installation, drawing, performance, wearables
Website: nkirukaoparah.com
nkiruka oparah (they/them) was born in Nigeria and lives and works in Oakland, California. They received a BS in Psychology from the University of Georgia and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where they also teach. They are a founding member of the 5/5ths Collective, dedicated to exploring Black(ness) as idea, consciousness, and embodied experience through space, language, and visual culture. Their work has been exhibited internationally at副本 INSTANCE in Shanghai (2021), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2020), La Box in Bourges, France (2019), Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, the Southbank Centre in London, and the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria, as well as at Land and Sea Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, BAMPFA, and the Museum of the African Diaspora in the Bay Area.
oparah works fluidly across collage, installation, drawing, experimental printmaking, wearables, and performance, exploring the poetics of collage as a language outside of conventional form — a metaphor for poetry, improvisation, and the fluid ambiguity of time. Their installation practice draws on cultural memory and utilizes the histories of found and recycled materials alongside the image detritus of the internet to interrogate ideas of time, progress, identity, and spirit. A sustained dream practice — recording dreams each morning for over five years — underpins much of the work, functioning as a method for accessing collective and ancestral knowledge and mapping inner landscapes. Their recent work considers how experiences of longing and the wisdom of grief can be transmitted through distortions of the Modernist grid to create new models of belonging. Wearables are an extension of installation: garments and objects designed to be worn and activated by a body in space.
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