Smack Mellon is thrilled to host the NYC launch of Victoria-Idongesit Udondian’s monograph How Can I Be Nobody (Hirmer Publishers, 2024). The publication follows her eponymous 2022 exhibition in Smack Mellon’s main gallery space, a site-specific installation combining woven textiles, sculptures, and sound, which served as her first major solo exhibition in New York City.
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian is a contemporary artist whose work is driven by an interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity. She explores creativity, culture, and memory in everyday materials through the histories and tacit meanings embedded in contemporary textiles. Udondian uses this conceptual framework to create interdisciplinary projects that question notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions in relation to her experiences growing up in Nigeria, and her America-based transnational art practice. Her artworks examine the complexities of migration and racial and cultural identity in the global context. How Can I Be Nobody is the first publication to document and contextualize Udondian’s creative interrogation of textiles and shifting cultural identities within a global trade system, characterized by the movement of goods and people from one part of the world to the other.
-Hirmer Publishers
The event will feature a screening of the Udondian’s newest film work–a continuation of this ongoing project–followed by a discussion between the artist and contributor Akil Kumarasamy, moderated by Rachel Vera Steinberg. Copies of the publication will be available for purchase at this event.
Bios:
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and Lambda Literary Award, and the linked story collection, Half Gods, (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian’s interdisciplinary works examine the intersection between immigration, labor, global trade systems and our postcolonial condition. She received an MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University, New York; attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has a BA in painting from the University of Uyo, Nigeria. She is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, New York. In 2020, Udondian was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her works have been exhibited internationally at The British Textile Biennial, United Kingdom; Hacer Nocer at Museo Textil de Oaxaca, (Textile Museum of Oaxaca), Mexico; The Bronx Museum, New York; The Inaugural Nigerian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial-An Excerpt; Fisher Landau Centre for the Arts, New York; National Museum, Lokaja and Lagos, Nigeria; Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Lagos; Spring Break Art Fair, New York; The Children Museum of Manhattan, New York; Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice, Italy; Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, UK; and the National Gallery of Arts, Uyo, Nigeria, and Smack Mellon, NY. Some of her Artist Residencies include Fountainhead Residency in Miami; Instituto Sacatar, Bahia, Brazil; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Massachusetts, USA; Fine Arts Work Centre (FAWC), Provincetown; USA; Villa Straulli, Winterthur, Switzerland; Fondazione di Venezia, Venice, Italy and Bag Factory Studios, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work has been reviewed internationally by The Guardian, UK and Nigeria; The Times, UK; Hyperallergic; Elephant Magazine; The Art Newspaper, and ArtNet News.
Image: Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, Ubom Iba, 2021, Metal, salvaged shipping pallets, used shoes, shoelaces, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.