Artist Database

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1995 and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He is an artist, curator, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice is an inquiry into semiotic dissonance. Tapping into a diverse spectrum of influences—from experimental music and literature to history and futurisms—Ukaigwe approaches his art practice as a double gesture. On one hand, his work is a way of annotating, augmenting, defacing, transposing, and rewriting in the margins of a palimpsestic history. On the other hand, his paintings, installations, and video works are an attempt to assemble and compose a speculative sensorium that permits hearing in a different tempo; one that collapses the subject-object divide and maps out new and revised sociographies. By bringing to centre facets of everyday life, Ukaigwe enacts a compositional practice that is fabulated out of the choice to meander in extant modes of being: fugitive, improvised, ongoing and otherwise. Ukaigwe’s social practice is established on the foundations of splintered or shared authorship, community input, and relativity. He holds a BFA (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and was the 2020 recipient of the Scott Leroux Fund for Media Arts Exploration. Ukaigwe is a founding member of the Winnipeg-based curatorial group Patterns Collective.