Chinaza Agbor: Kindness and Hospitality from a Foreigner

Luminous and liminal, dislocated, and embodied, the black female body and its sexuality are explored and engendered, straining between conformity and divergence.  

Our Love is Never Ending, 2022

Through earthy tones and textures, Chinaza Agbor seeks to revisit her upbringing in the American South by two Nigerian parents, thus reconsidering her identity. The exhibition's haze and miasma of colours express not only her childhood's humid and perspiring heat but also the general sensation of nostalgia. Paintings of bodies and faces are enacted through the wet materiality of oil, grasping the thickness of flesh and twists of female torsos, while underpinned by textured acrylic which formulate peaks and troughs of memory.

 A tea set clad with Afro weave fuses the domestic place with its bodies.

Through the series, Agbor explores leitmotifs of home and foreignness, postulating the open-ended question of where we call home. Referencing Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Object’- who collides polite society with the raw inner self - and underlaid with Mary Douglas’ idea of ‘Matter Out of Place’, Agbor’s sculptural work further embodies ideas. A tea set clad with Afro weave fuses the domestic place with its bodies. Here, she advances intricate issues towards the viewer, questioning what we call familiar and different, and what bodies we view as objects to touch or, tools to utilise.

These landscapes also imply that confronting one’s childhood is always a collision course between familiarity and estrangement. Hence bodies are marginalised to corners of the canvas, or in one work – Why haven’t I won the prize of femininity? -  they are kaleidoscopically dislocated and dislodged.

Since she places her identity as a black female at the centre of the exhibition, all works are fascinated by its materiality. Agbor confronts and explores the limitations of her embodiment. Figures are meticulously translated into oil onto canvas, but their stark nakedness works against mainstream sexualities. Instead, these bodies are devoid of desire, they seem lifeless and buffered – as if paused by the voyeur’s eye.

For Agbor, confronting nostalgia is a conflicted experience, it is filled with the bittersweet acknowledgement that these landscapes are muted and diffused, existing only in memory. Agbor puts this into a visual spectrum through sculptures and glowing canvases, ultimately driving at the question: when does the familiar become the unfamiliar?

VISITING INFO:

GALLERY NAME: Cob Gallery

ADDRESS: 205 Royal College Street, NW1 0SG

DATES: 25 November - 16 December 2023

Recognition for photography Courtesy of Cob Gallery