The Ant that Eats Away What You Keep, 2014.
About:
The ant that eats away what you keep # 6, 2014.
Uche Uzorka is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. Uzorka was born in 1974 in Delta State, Nigeria, and graduated in 2001 from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, majoring in painting. Uzorka’s practice incorporates painting, collage, cutting and pasting, charcoal, and ink drawing in an examination of processes of urban street culture. Uzorka won First Place in the National Art Competition in 2011 for his collaboration with artist Chike Obeagu. His first solo exhibition, Uche Uzorka: The Organic, was held in October 2012 at Goethe-Institut Nigeria in association with the African Artists’ Foundation. Line.Sign.Symbol, Uzorka’s second solo exhibition, was held at the African Artists’ Foundation in January 2013. Other exhibitions include Where were you when I was here?, 2014, Sübkültür Bayreuth Germany, Integration and Resistance, 10th Biennale of Havana, Havana, Cuba, 2010.ntegration and Resistance, 10th Biennale of Havana, Havana, Cuba, 2010.
From his notes written down while in Bayreuth in 2014:
“It felt strange to pay for Nigerian food – is about alienation, inclusion and the outside perception of a subject .It is about anonymous authorship and the free archive that the web represents .
This is the first part of an idea which is a reference to the strangeness of perception and the force that lies behind the story-telling powers of images. Strangeness of perception here refers to the realization that what is taken as known and understood can be re-referred, re-framed and also re-perceived and therefore re-understood since the original image relating to it seemingly has taken a new tone or changed a color or presently comes with a subtitle or indeed a language translation .Bearing in mind that some of these transient tones of passage can indeed fluctuate an image to changeable degrees of sensitivity and therefore strangulate the viewer into a redefinition of what is seen.
The ant that eats away what you keep # 3, 2014.
I worked with phrases and search captions on web search engines such as google. Relying entirely on the internet for information about the subject known as Nigeria.
Using a form of image re-presentation known as shredding which by definition means putting paper printed images through a shredding machine in order to cut them up into shreds or little pieces so that the images themselves become shredded and therefore gain a new form of being by becoming smaller and subsequently manifesting themselves in manageable multiples .The idea, simple as it is, was to process images in multiples of small units and then hide them in bags and sachets for visual presentation . In total about three hundred images were downloaded from the web based on the suggested phrases and printed in multiples to total about seven thousand photographs
During the search process, it was interesting to see how certain searched images grouped under a caption would pop up and interweave under other seemingly unrelated captions
About seven thousand photographs were re-presented through a shredding machine and then packed in several garbage bags and transparent sachets for installation at the savvy contemporary art space in Berlin. “
Tear and wear, 2015.
Uche on his Line works:
“Line.Sign.Symbol is about the power of lines. You can literally do anything with a line and you’ll never know where it will end up. The unknown is what I am curious about. I like the idea of crowds, congestion and noise. In Lagos these are part of the societal rhythms, it becomes a system of its own. The constant noise becomes music, the pollution, long lines and overcrowding become a part of everyday life and you have to keep up. It makes you wonder–like the lines on the drawings–where did it all begin, where will it ever end?
It takes a remarkable amount of emotional energy to fill in each patch of paper. I allow the process to be king–what can happen next? One initiative inspires another and another and before you know it, it has taken on a life of its own. It is easy to enjoy the process (sketching) while it is going on and on, but the process itself can overpower you. I have to step back from the piece, calm down and allow it to condense, sink in; otherwise I run the risk of bleaching out the whole story.
I was very quiet so they didn’t know what I could, or could not do. I was a mystery to all of them. But you don’t need the whole world believing in you, just a few people and they will go ahead and translate that message on to more and more people.”
(Quotes from ‘OkayAfrica, Posted February 13, 2013 by Hauwa R. Mukan)