Artists

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, Muzae Sesay

Press release

Breaking Down Realities reviews the notion of 'value': ethical, political, economic, emotional, and environmental, in relation to the infrastructures of coloniality and the flows of global capital, between the African continent and the rest of the world. This exhibition highlights the established research and conditions that each artist refers to, illuminating how this enduring phenomenon is observed by participating artists: Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay. Nifemi Marcus-Bello is a Lagos, Nigeria based industrial designer and artist whose practice is grounded in humility, cultural context, and process-led innovation. Working between commercial and artistic design, he draws on African traditions to create objects that are intuitive, functional, and deeply tied to place. His approach treats design as a living dialogue—responsive, evolving, and informed by real-world interactions. His objects function as archives, reflecting cycles of evolution, scarcity, and abundance. His series, ORÍKÌ (2023–2025), oríkì being traditional Yoruba praise poetry bestowed upon a person, unfolds as critically poetic material experimentations and close collaborations with producer-craftsmen, using locally rooted fabrication methods that reframe material use. Hadassa Ngamba is a multidisciplinary artist from Boma and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the former being a port city historically central to the transatlantic slave trade and the latter for mining and rare earth extraction. Working across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, digital media, installation, and performance, Ngamba's peripatetic AI (African Intelligence) research and artistic productions, take their starting points from the colonial cartography of the DRC, and how the actions of mapping have facilitated imperial exploitation. Her work interrogates the foundations of capitalism and confronts the inhumane consequences of an unequal global system. Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator based in Montreal. His work examines displaced histories and their contemporary effects of which he has been critically re-reading the entanglements of colonialism and modernity particularly between Horn of Africa and North African countries, Italy, the United States and Canada. Informed by his lived experience as an Eritrean emigrant, his practice explores the historical forces that produce migration, using photography, moving image, sculpture, and sound. Muzae Sesay is a visual artist based in Oakland, California, United States, whose studio practice and works for the public realm explore the relationships between space, memory, community, and perceived truth. Using skewed perspectives and flattened planes of colour, he creates paintings of surreal geometric interiors, landscapes, and architectural forms that invite exploration. His work questions the reliability of remembrance and reflects on shared realities through fragmented, perspectival, unstable worlds.