Represented
Emeka Nwosu
b. 1976, Lagos
Lives and works in London
Wall-mounted assemblages of printed matter, pressed and resined into slabs that can be read only at the edges.
Emeka Nwosu makes slabs. Each one is a compressed block of printed paper: newspapers, freight manifests, church bulletins, school exercise books, mail order catalogues, whatever a specific place produced in a specific window of time. The material is sourced by location and period, stacked, saturated with clear resin and put under a hydraulic press for several days.
What comes out is a solid rectangle with two blank faces and four edges that are entirely made of text. The content is intact and completely inaccessible. You can read the first millimetre of any page and nothing else. Nwosu is interested in this precise condition, the archive that exists, is verifiably present, and cannot be consulted.
The titles are the only key. Lagos, March to July 1994 tells you what is inside and that is all you will get. Nwosu has been working this way since 2011 and has produced around ninety slabs, covering fourteen cities. He is explicit that the project is not about loss. The paper has not been destroyed. It has been made permanent in exchange for being made useless, which he considers a fair description of most archives.
Nwosu studied at the Slade. His work is in the collections of Tate, the Zeitz MOCAA and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was included in the 2022 Lagos Biennial. He joined the gallery in 2018.
