EKENE EMEKA-MADUKA

She was born and raised in Kano, Nigeria and relocated to Canada where she been for the past seven years and where received her degree in visual arts.

The foundation of Emeka Maduka’s work is the liminal, transient space between the assessment of scenarios and the emergence of emotion in response to them. In this body of work, the experiences, journeys and emotions, animated through the physicality of the aspiring, immigrating, or migrated bodies enduring them, stand a map to the viewer.

Our inability to know for a fact ahead of time and to predict future versions of ourselves and our reality are what makes life sweet and painful. They are what makes life exciting and very disappointing. Since the beginning of the year, there has been so much loss and, it feels like there’s such little time to process this pain. Things are forgotten so easily until the occasional moment a scent, a feeling, a thing, a colour revives the humanness of loss. This project is very much about time spent apart, and what is inevitably brought with it. It is simply about life. More specifically, it is about the lives of immigrants with loved ones and histories left behind.

For members of this homogenous community, human conditioning and individual versus collective desires are debatable. The space will become a portal for people to escape, housing three extremely condensed chapters of life. For the duration of the show, the gallery will be open for viewers to wonder, experience, relate to, misunderstand, feel confusion, and be with the characters. In dissatisfied efforts to solve the question: what to do with all this feeling? The gallery will serve as a net to cast worries—even just for a day.