Ndidi Dike

Biography

Ndidi Dike called her first solo exhibition “Mixed Media Expose”. It was 1986, and she made most of the work during her year of National Youth Service, the compulsory year of national service for Nigerian university graduates.

She was born in London in 1960. Her family comes from Amaokwe Item in Bende local government area of Abia State, in south-eastern Nigeria. It was art classes in primary school that first drew her to art. She completed her secondary education in England, where she took interdisciplinary art classes. She later recalled that what she loved in them was the freedom of interpretation and the chance to try different materials. Returning to Nigeria, she entered the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in Enugu State. She first received a diploma in music education (voice), then in 1984 a B.A. in Fine and Applied Arts, majoring in mixed-media painting. Among her teachers were Uche Okeke and Obiora Udechukwu, prominent figures of the Nsukka school. After her service Dike decided to become a professional artist and worked in a studio in Owerri, the capital of Imo State.

From 1986 to 2002 she had ten solo exhibitions, and from 1986 to 2005 she took part in 57 group shows. Among the exhibitions of those years were “Women to Women, Weaving Cultures, Shaping History” at Indiana State University (2000), “Totems and Signpost” at the Goethe-Institut in Lagos (2002, solo) and “Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1995). She is a member of the Guild of Fine Arts, Nigeria, the Society of Nigerian Artists and the Royal Society of Sculptors in London.

The main subject of her recent work is the slave trade, colonialism and their consequences. For each piece Dike spends months gathering material, and the objects she chooses for her mixed-media works are dictated by the subject. She is also interested in the value of goods and of human life, in gender inequality and in patriarchy. She traces her connection to these subjects to her Nigerian identity, even though she was born in London.

In 2008 two solo exhibitions of hers were held in Lagos: “Tapestry of Life: New Beginnings” at the National Museum and “Waka-into-Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile” at the Centre for Contemporary Art (curated by Bisi Silva). The second marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, which had gone almost unnoticed in Nigeria’s cultural calendar. Dike first visited Badagri, on the old route by which enslaved people were taken away, in 2002, returned only in 2007, and then decided that she had to convey this subject in dramatic visual form. In the sculpture “Dwellings, Doors and Windows” she took harbour pallets apart and reassembled them so that the form evokes the Middle Passage (the transport of enslaved people across the Atlantic). A striking motif of the work is blood; according to Dike, it stands for what was shed before, during and after the trans-Atlantic trade, and for what is still being shed. After the exhibition she said she would like to turn to modern forms of slavery as well. In the 2010s the geography of her exhibitions widened: the National Museum in Lagos (2012, 2016), the Jogja Biennale (2015), Bayreuth (Iwalewahaus, 2017 and 2018), Villa Vassilieff in Paris (2017), “Ex-Africa” in Brazil (2017–2018), the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre (2018), the Dakar Biennale (2018), the Palais de Tokyo (2019) and the Lagos Biennial (2019). Her residencies include the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Gasworks in London, TENQ in Senegal and Tate Modern. Her works are in public and private collections in Nigeria and abroad.

In 2023, at the South London Gallery in London, in the exhibition “Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes”, she showed an installation about the history of Lagos: objects, places and people are set against one another in it as rivals in a dispute over what should be counted as valuable. In 2022 the publisher Iwalewabooks issued her first monograph, “Discomfort Zones”.