Artist Victor Ehikhamenor Speaks on His Latest Exhibition 'Undoing The Cities'

Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor has spent more than two decades exploring the intersections of art, memory, spirituality and the histories that shape how we understand ourselves and the places we call home. With Undoing the City, Making Home, his first solo exhibition in Australia, he turns to the changing histories of Sydney, bringing them into conversation with places such as Port Harcourt to examine displacement, belonging and who gets to define the future of a place.

Having represented Nigeria at its inaugural Venice Biennale pavilion in 2017, Ehikhamenor has built a practice that extends beyond visual art into literature and cultural institution-building. For New Wave, we spoke about the research behind the exhibition, the histories embedded in ordinary objects, and what happens when we encounter a familiar idea of home in an unfamiliar place.

Victor Ehikhamenor, 'Undoing the city'. Image credit: Chau Chak Wing Museum.

You have been engaging with Sydney through this project for two years. What did you initially set out to find, and what did you discover instead?

The project emerged from research conducted over two years by two professors, Lucia Sorbera and Mark Levine, working across different locations, including Okrika in the Niger Delta. My role was to engage with that research and consider how some of its questions could be translated into an installation.

What interested me was what happens to the idea of home when a city changes, when the environment is disrupted, or when people are compelled to move. Coming to Sydney allowed me to encounter these questions from another perspective. The objects might be different, and the architecture might be different, but the desire to preserve something of where you come from and find familiarity in an unfamiliar place is something I could recognise.

What I found was not necessarily an answer to the question of home, but a broader understanding of how people carry it with them.

Was there a moment when Sydney stopped being a subject of research and became personal to you?

I think it became personal through the objects. When I started gathering things for the installation, I was picking up objects that spoke to me, some used, some ordinary domestic things that people might not necessarily pay attention to. I was responding to them through my own sensibility and the things I remembered from home.

But when I shared a video of the installation with my family, one of my relatives began identifying things that reminded her of the different homes we had lived in. She spoke about the mirror, the drawers, the money and tickets left inside them, and the tie hanging by the door.

She interpreted the tie as a kind of costume that someone removes after a long day of pretending to be somebody else in order to provide for their family. That interpretation stayed with me because she was not approaching the work as an art critic. She was recognising something of her own life in it.

That was when I began to understand how these objects could move beyond my own memories. What I was assembling from my experiences could also speak to somebody else’s sense of home.

What does bringing Port Harcourt into a conversation with Sydney allow you to say that you could not say about either city on its own?

Bringing Port Harcourt into this conversation allows us to see that the transformation of a city is never only about physical space. In the Niger Delta, particularly in places such as Okrika, questions of home are inseparable from the environment, extraction, the disruption of communities and the movement of people. When you place these experiences alongside Sydney, you begin to recognise that the relationship between people and the places they inhabit is more complicated than it might initially appear.

There is also the history of material things. In Nigeria, when you talk about Okrika, you are talking about secondhand clothes and used objects. There is a history behind that, connected to trade and our encounters with the Western world. Now, here I am in Sydney, gathering used objects to make an installation about home, memory and displacement. These things have travelled through different histories before arriving in the space where I am using them.

Neither city needs to become a substitute for the other. Bringing them together allows us to consider how different histories can produce similar questions. What happens when people lose access to familiar spaces? What do they carry with them? And what does it mean to establish a home somewhere else?

Whose Sydney became most important to you while making this work? Was there anything you had to reconsider about the city?

I was particularly interested in Sydney as experienced by people who had migrated there and were making a home for themselves. There is a street close to where I was staying, King Street, that has a great diversity of communities, restaurants and food cultures. You encounter Asian food, Mediterranean restaurants and different communities living alongside one another. You begin to see a city that is not defined by one identity but is constantly being shaped by the people who arrive and make lives there.

I also became more conscious of the language we use to describe migration. In Nigeria, a white person arriving to work might be described as an expatriate, whereas in the Western world, that same person could be classified as an immigrant. The word is often applied differently depending on who is moving and where they are moving to. Meanwhile, in Australia, there are Indigenous communities whose relationship to the land long predates the arrival of the many populations who now inhabit it.

I had to look beyond the idea of Sydney as one identifiable city with one story. It is a constellation of communities, histories and experiences, and those experiences are not necessarily given equal visibility. I was interested in the Sydney of people trying to establish belonging, sometimes across generations, and in how their presence changes the character of the city.

Victor Ehikhamenor, 'so far'. Image credit: Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Did anything you encountered in Sydney change how you understood your relationship to Port Harcourt?

I think it made me more conscious of how much of home we carry without necessarily realising it. You might leave a place and imagine that you have moved away from it, but you continue to carry its memories, habits, language and the things that shaped your understanding of the world.

Working with used objects in Sydney also brought me back to the history of Okrika and the circulation of secondhand goods. I began thinking about how objects acquire different meanings as they move from one place to another. Something that might appear ordinary in one context can carry an entirely different history in another.

I would not say that Sydney fundamentally changed my understanding of Port Harcourt. Rather, it gave me another perspective from which to consider it. Sometimes, it takes encountering a different place to recognise what you have been carrying from your own.

Your work often brings inherited visual traditions into the contemporary world. Were there moments when those references resisted one another rather than fitting neatly together?

There were certainly things I wanted to include that did not eventually make it into the exhibition. When you are working with different cultural references, you have to consider what an object communicates in one place and what it might communicate somewhere else. There are things that people back home would immediately recognise, such as the amulets beneath the stained glass, but which might require a different kind of engagement from an audience in Sydney.

I was not interested in removing those references simply because they might not be immediately understood. At the same time, I had to consider how each element contributed to the installation as a whole.

The work Call Home When You Arrive was particularly challenging in this regard. It uses a classic telephone, something that is almost obsolete now, to consider the act of calling home after leaving one place for another. But the work also carries a more difficult implication. When we think about people who migrate by water, we must also acknowledge those who never arrive and the families who continue waiting for a call that will never come.

There is a certain weight to that idea, and I had to think carefully about how to translate it into an installation. The telephone can be familiar, even humorous in its outdatedness, but the absence it represents is much more serious. For me, the challenge was allowing these different meanings to coexist without reducing the work to a single interpretation. Sometimes, the tension between materials, histories and meanings is precisely what makes the work possible.

Your work is presented in a museum, but you have also been working with emerging African-diaspora creatives in Western Sydney. What happens to the meaning of the exhibition when you take it into the community?

I think that was one of the most important experiences of this project. When you take the work beyond the museum and encounter people whose experiences are connected to some of the questions you are exploring, the exhibition becomes part of a larger conversation about how people live, remember and understand themselves.

Some of the artists came to Australia when they were very young; others were born there. Some have not returned to the countries their families came from. Their relationships to those places are complicated, shaped by memory, inherited histories and experiences that are not always easy to articulate.

One of the participants, a young radio presenter from Sudan, researched the emergence of Nigerian rock music in the aftermath of the Civil War. She looked at how a particular historical and political moment gave rise to a musical culture, and the depth of her research was eye-opening for me. Here was somebody approaching Nigerian history from a different position and helping me see something about it that I had not considered in quite the same way.

The meaning changes because the work is no longer only about what I have made. It becomes about what other people recognise, question and bring into the conversation. That exchange is just as important to me as presenting the exhibition in a museum.

What have the younger artists you are mentoring challenged you on?

They have challenged me to remain open to the fact that there is always something to learn, even about things you believe you already know. We sometimes assume that mentorship means one person has the knowledge and the other person is there to receive it. But I have always believed that you can begin as a mentor and, in the process, become a mentee yourself. You have to be willing to surrender to learning from the people you are working with.

The young creatives I have encountered in Sydney come from different backgrounds and work across photography, filmmaking, radio, fine art and digital art. They bring different ways of looking at the world, and their experiences of migration and belonging are not identical.

I hope they have learned something from seeing my process, from the early stages of gathering materials to the final installation. But I have also learned from watching how they respond to ideas and approach their own research. For me, mentorship should be a conversation in which both sides remain capable of being surprised.

Victor Ehikhamenor, Numinous Night. Image credit: Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Your work often deals with memory, but this project is also interested in what happens when memory is contested. Whose memory becomes history, and who gets left with the loss?

I think history is often determined by who has the opportunity to record it, who has the language to articulate it, and whose experiences are considered important enough to preserve. But there are many histories that exist outside official records. They live in people’s homes, in the things they keep, in the stories they tell their children, and in memories they carry even when the places associated with them no longer exist in the same way.

I think about the Niger Delta, for instance, and how environmental degradation and extraction can change the relationship between a community and its land. You can document the physical transformation of a place, but what happens to the memories of the people who lived there? What happens to the everyday things that give that place meaning? Those experiences do not always find their way into the larger narratives of development and progress.

In this exhibition, I am interested in the histories that ordinary objects can carry. A used shirt, a drawer, a mirror or a household item might appear insignificant, but these things can hold memories that are deeply personal and, at the same time, recognisable to other people.

When I use them in an installation, I am not necessarily trying to tell somebody else’s story for them. I am creating a space where these objects can prompt people to recognise and reflect on histories that might otherwise remain unspoken.

I think the question is not simply whose memory becomes history, but also what we choose to recognise as history in the first place. Sometimes, what gets left behind is not only a place or an object, but the possibility of having one’s experience acknowledged. Art can create room for those experiences to be encountered, even if it cannot restore everything that has been lost.

When you leave Sydney, what do you think will stay with you from this exhibition that has nothing to do with the works themselves?

That human beings are the same everywhere, even though our experiences are shaped by different social conditions. You encounter people whose backgrounds are different from yours, whose histories you may not know, and whose experiences of home and belonging might initially seem very distant from your own. But when you begin to listen to them, you discover points of connection.

Working with the younger creatives in Western Sydney reinforced that for me. I came into the project with my own experiences and my own way of understanding these questions, but I also had the opportunity to listen to people who were negotiating their relationships with place, identity and memory. Some of their experiences were different from mine, but there were emotions and questions that I could recognise.

Beyond the works themselves, I will carry the encounters, the conversations and the things I have learned from other people. An exhibition has a life beyond the objects that constitute it. The objects may remain in a museum, but the conversations they initiate continue elsewhere, in the people who encountered them and in the things those encounters make them remember.