visual/sound art
I Heard Your Call Ancestors: Do You Know My Name? (2021-ongoing)
Photographic installation. 35mm B&W film, papier-mâché mask, body, gesture.
The first in an ongoing series of self-portraits, this work marked the beginning of a personal inquiry into cultural inheritance, memory and the embodied poetics of masquerade. Shot on 35mm black and white film, the images document a performance undertaken in a mask I sculpted by hand, a raw composite of paper, wallpaper paste, a plastic container, oil, sweat and white paint.
What emerged in the process was a spiritual register I hoped for, but never anticipated would be made visible.
Masquerade, across many African cosmologies, is a living, breathing technology, one that mediates between the ancestral and the earthly, the seen and the unseen.
With countless traditional masks displaced or held in European collections, this piece is both a reclamation and a quiet resistance.
It speaks to the survival of ritual through reinvention and the potency of masking for the first time.
What emerged in the process was a spiritual register I hoped for, but never anticipated would be made visible.
Masquerade, across many African cosmologies, is a living, breathing technology, one that mediates between the ancestral and the earthly, the seen and the unseen.
With countless traditional masks displaced or held in European collections, this piece is both a reclamation and a quiet resistance.
It speaks to the survival of ritual through reinvention and the potency of masking for the first time.
Blacknuss! (2022)
Technologies of Joy, Care and Intimacy
300m² installation, performance series, living archive.
Obaro Ejimiwe, in collabaration with Luiza Prado.
Conceived for Kampnagel’s 2022 Summer Festival, Blacknuss! unfolded as a spatial experiment in Black joy, care and relational intimacy.
Occupying 300 square meters, the installation functioned simultaneously as a home, an archive and a site of transformation—welcoming some as visitors, others as dwellers.
At its core, Blacknuss! paid homage to the sacred, everyday rituals that sustain life within Afrodiasporic communities.
This processual work explored the transmission and reconstruction of diasporic knowledge across performance and sound. Engaging with questions of (in)visibility and the oscillation between public and domestic realms of Blackness, the installation evolved weekly through a series of live activations composed and conducted by Obaro, each offering plural visions for collective possibility.
Performance: The Tools That Built This House
Performers: Formosah, Oumou Dembele, Wendy Pino, Obaro Ejimiwe
Staged within the ancestral garden space of the installation, The Tools That Built This House traced Black domestic life through material memory and sonic ritual. Performed three times across the evening, the work braided spoken word with percussion and melody to meditate on rhythm as inheritance—on the tools, literal and metaphorical, that build and sustain home.
Performance Dinner: All Black Every-Ting
Chef: Jamila Celuch
All Black Every-Ting offered a sensory inquiry into Black foodways, ancestral memory and the poetics of nourishment. In collaboration with guest chef Jamila Celuch, Black residents of Hamburg were invited to an intimate performance-dinner that reimagined culturally and aesthetically Black cuisines through playful, affective interventions.
Shielded from public view by a curtain, the dinner created a protected space for conversation, care and reflection.
Food became a medium for transmitting diasporic knowledge—an offering, a ritual, a remembering.
The dinner was also recorded and transformed into a 2-hour sound piece, played on loop beneath the table for the remainder of the exhibition. Manipulated into sonic fragments—glimpses of voices, laughter, utensils, memory—the audio remained partially encrypted, accessible only as ghostly traces to those observing from the outside.
A short excerpt from the audio is available below.
Performers: Fani, Formosah, Hélissa, Mariama Ceasay, Mady Toupka, Betty Paha, Obaro Ejimiwe
Closing the programme, Carefully, So Carefully was a tender invocation of Black hair care as a site of resistance, remembrance and reinvention.
Activating the livingroom installation through the slow, deliberate gestures of braiders and the voices of singers, the work honoured the intimacy of touch, the transmission of family knowledge,
and the radical softness embedded in Afro-diasporic life-worlds.
What Kind of River Has No Middle? (2022-ongong)
Sound installation. Slaná River water, orange sediment, plexiglass container, subwoofer.
This installation, the first experiment of sorts - traces a recurring, transnational pattern: rivers rendered toxic by extractive industries. In 2019, the collapse of the Brumadinho dam in Minas Gerais, Brazil, released a wave of mining waste that devastated communities and reshaped ecosystems. Thousands of miles away, in Slovakia, water leaking from an abandoned iron ore mine has turned the
Slaná River a persistent shade of orange, its contamination slow, spectral, ongoing.
At the heart of the work is a plexiglass container filled with water collected from the Slaná. Beneath it, a subwoofer emits low-frequency sound, causing a layer of iron-rich sediment to stir, rise,
and resettle. The result is a visual and sonic tension—quiet, volatile, unstable. A body on the brink of spilling.
What Kind of River Has No Middle? considers extraction as a sonic and material condition. It asks how rivers—fluid, connective, and vital—become sites of violence, bearing the weight of histories they did not choose. The work marks the first in a series exploring the entanglements of water, toxicity and the more-than-human within the accelerating climate crisis.
Slaná River a persistent shade of orange, its contamination slow, spectral, ongoing.
At the heart of the work is a plexiglass container filled with water collected from the Slaná. Beneath it, a subwoofer emits low-frequency sound, causing a layer of iron-rich sediment to stir, rise,
and resettle. The result is a visual and sonic tension—quiet, volatile, unstable. A body on the brink of spilling.
What Kind of River Has No Middle? considers extraction as a sonic and material condition. It asks how rivers—fluid, connective, and vital—become sites of violence, bearing the weight of histories they did not choose. The work marks the first in a series exploring the entanglements of water, toxicity and the more-than-human within the accelerating climate crisis.
Endurance (2023-ongoing)
Video (16:30), four-channel spatial sound, digital photography.
Filmed during a stay in São Paulo, Brasil Endurance began as a meditation on visibility, resilience and the quiet violence of urban neglect.
This particular work moves between an extended rooftop observation of a resident’s morning excercise and a solitary figure lying motionless on the street below—both suspended in states of inertia,
both etched into the city's sensory field. Connected and unconnected.
Projected image and spatialised audio combine to form a kind of urban portraiture: intimate yet distanced, immersed yet disconnected.
The soundtrack, composed entirely from manipulated field recordings, amplifies the texture of São Paulo’s sonic topography—traffic, birdsong, drones, silence—an unrelenting hum of life unfolding.
Foregrounding the racialised body in public space, Endurance reflects on themes of precarity, marginalisation and the psychic toll of survival.
The piece invites the viewer to linger in discomfort, to listen with intention and to witness what is so often rendered invisible.
sound performance
Vienna — October 2025
This particular work moves between an extended rooftop observation of a resident’s morning excercise and a solitary figure lying motionless on the street below—both suspended in states of inertia,
both etched into the city's sensory field. Connected and unconnected.
Projected image and spatialised audio combine to form a kind of urban portraiture: intimate yet distanced, immersed yet disconnected.
The soundtrack, composed entirely from manipulated field recordings, amplifies the texture of São Paulo’s sonic topography—traffic, birdsong, drones, silence—an unrelenting hum of life unfolding.
Foregrounding the racialised body in public space, Endurance reflects on themes of precarity, marginalisation and the psychic toll of survival.
The piece invites the viewer to linger in discomfort, to listen with intention and to witness what is so often rendered invisible.
sound performance
Vienna — October 2025