Odera Igbokwe - This Body of Mine

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Odera Igbokwe, “Funeral Rites,” no date

(courtesy Odera Igbokwe and THIS Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, Jan 11, Noon - 5pm

THIS Gallery is excited to announce its first exhibition of 2025. This Body of Mine, is a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based Nigerian-American artist Odera Igbokwe.

In their exhibition This Body of Mine, Odera Igbokwe explores the veil between physical and spiritual figuration. These works question and distill the embodiment of ancestral technologies with contemporary mundane tasks through the lens of the Black Queer body.

Resilience. Wonder and Awe. Repression. Pleasure. Invisibility and Hypervisibility. These paintings draw a throughline between the expectations and the spirit-led realities of Black and Queer intersections.

This Body of Mine reflects and kaleidoscopically embodies the nature of diaspora, and the loss, reclamation, and alchemy that occurs as a result.  Some of these works assert embodiment, euphoria, and expression as a birthright. While the new works Funeral Rites and Mourning Pages draw upon personal heirlooms, routine, and ritual to reify the power of generational curses and generational blessings. These multi-media pieces ask the viewer to meditate on the transference of memory through the senses and the ability to exist in multiple planes at once. This Body of Mine asserts that the Black Queer body is not simply a vessel to hyperpersonal lived experiences, but rather a fulcrum and progenitor of universal ancestral technologies and embodied futurities.