An oracle mumbles the dreams of a
Beautiful wanderer
Obliterating fear
From a single memory archive
Spiraling diamond
Sparkle
Sun
Pierces black water
Riddling
(suddenly rustling love)
The wind moves soft here
By the roots of where I am planted shall you know me
Bush of soul-black sun searcher
Windstrewn so the hidden objects
Sprout – followed by all the shades of blackness more than the color of black
Sprouted spaced
Light the night itself holding in a vortex of giving giving giving.
Eons on and on and there he is hunting thru the archive Dozie manages to be like rolling magma breaking and solidifying something new sometimes old form shifting and shaping into destruction rebuilding new form new sun space is born always already with him a kinetic transference leaving zoomorphic objects in his wake, something like a prayer of strange manufacturing and questionable origin impossible to photograph and least of all impossible to know… transcendent material qualifiers, earthy articles can never catch, cosmic effluvia.
Precious Okoyomon: Dozie, the dismemberment of your growth has been so fun for me to watch. Like, I’m obsessed with how you let yourself grow and play and evolve. You relocated to Portugal; you’re always playing with different materials — I don’t know — you’re such a shapeshifter.
Dozie Kanu: I see the same in you. That’s why we align.
PO Where’s your mind at right now? What are you working on?
DK I’m dying to get back in the studio and start working on this light-box piece.
PO Tell me about it.
DK The overall form is going to be very dependent on the found component. It’s this discarded robotic machine that I feel like might’ve been used in a science lab or at an eye doctor’s office. I can’t really figure out what it originally was.
PO Where do you find all the scraps? You go to the junkyards?
DK Yes, or antique shops. Anywhere really. I’ve gathered a list of really good spots over the years.
PO How did you get into that? Were you always good at finding things?
DK No. It really happened out of necessity. I started exercising it more after I made this piece for an exhibition in London that Jefferson Hack organized: “Transformer — A Rebirth of Wonder” at 180 The Strand.
PO What year was this?
DK It was early 2019. The budget was pretty hefty, which allowed me to explore different fabrication techniques for all the pieces for this show. There was one piece in particular that ended up costing way more than it should’ve because I sourced these stainless-steel submersible solar water pumps that were brand new. The piece turned out okay in the end, but I was feeling a bit guilty and disappointed because I was mostly drawn to the overall form of the water pumps, which, if I had been given more time, I might’ve been able to find the same forms or something similar without spending so much bread. This was happening at a time when I was thinking a lot about sustainability, not only within the environment but within the idea of having a sustainable art practice in general. That line of thinking prompted my move to Portugal in the first place. So, all of these feelings pushed me towards this determined mentality of finding the forms that I’m really drawn to and digging around for them instead of just snatching them up from easily accessible stores. Since then, I’ve mostly just been drawing with the things that I can find and put together.
PO There’s no English word for this, but in German, it’s Gesamtkunstwerk. That’s how I think about your objects. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle of different forms all coming together. How you puzzle things together makes me see the original forms differently, and I feel like I’m getting a real glimpse into how you view the world.
DK There’s this prescribed way that we’re conditioned to view things, and a large part of the enjoyment I find in making is boldly owning the agency we have to changing that; redirecting orientation.
PO Yes, there’s so much play involved. I feel like you have a deeply felt knowledge of who you are. Even when I think about your very early work, you knew your language. Nobody had to teach you because everything is so canonically you. Do you feel like you really know yourself?
DK Somebody said this to me before, and I felt weird because I thought: “Do you even know me? How do you know it’s me?” But yeah, I guess I know myself. I know what I don’t like, that’s for sure.
PO [laughs] What don’t you like, Dozie Kanu? Tell me what you don’t like. I want to know!
DK [laughs] Ummm… I don’t like people and things that ask to be loved. That goes back into the whole agency thing. Stop asking permission. Just be. Just do. That’s why I hate most politicians. They have to beg and plead for support.
PO I feel that.
DK So, how do we feel about Nigerian supremacy?
PO [laughs] We love Nigerians winning. Nigerian takeover, honestly.
DK [laughs] Isn’t it a bit scary, though? What if it becomes too much, and there’s too many successful ones in America?
PO I have this Nigerian model minority concept in my head. Nigerians are everywhere; they are taking over. It’s not our fault.
DK But what if it backfires? Black Americans just start hating Nigerian immigrants because they collectively become so prosperous.
PO [laughs] No, it would never come to that!
DK Okay, but look at Hollywood: many of the actors playing these Black American roles are Nigerian.
PO What we need is to form a coalition! Black Americans, Nigerian Americans, and all of the African diaspora, rise up! Prosper together! [laughs]
DK [laughs] The cultures are too different. Do you think it’s because Black parents don’t put as much stress and pressure on their children?
PO Nigerian parents are like, “How dare you fail?”
DK Yes, they’re like, “How dare you take our immigration for granted?
PO It scares me. My mother’s disappointment is the secret fuel underneath my ambition.
DK Have you talked about this with anyone?
PO In therapy, yes [laughs].
DK I feel it. I can’t fail my dad; the disappointment would actually kill him.
PO I feel like recently, everyone in my family has been unsatisfied.
DK Same! You know, my younger brother and older brother have completely checked out. They’ve kind of accepted that they will be failures in their eyes and just stopped engaging with both parents. They got sick of getting chastised. It’s almost like I’m the last hope, which puts the pressure on me tenfold.
PO You have to take care of your parents.
DK Do we, though?
PO Yes.
DK Okay, but once we’re at a place where we can hold them down, what’s next?
PO Right now, I’m obsessed with this vision of caring for everybody. I think that’s why I make the work that I make. My obsession with a type of world-building that can only exist in a different state of… life?
DK That’s something I’m trying to get over, actually. I often put other people’s well-being before my own.
PO We have that tendency. Both of us have serious roles of being caretakers in our families, and what does that mean for the work we produce? I think of your objects alluding to furniture as a real act of love and everyday care. How do you see that?
DK I would say there’s some generosity involved. This object I made has the potential to pragmatically serve; don’t crown it an amazing sculpture.
PO Living with objects that can hold you and serve you differently is special.
DK I agree. Being aware of the industry that we’ve both somehow found ourselves in being predominantly populated by elitist white collectors, I feel like it might be more challenging to ask the populace to imagine living with objects that are Black, hug on them, and interact with them. It’s not just on your wall or on a pedestal. It could be a little step closer. I’m alluding to that intimate space. So much of what exists in the material world lacks the Black perspective. And I feel art can sometimes be too much of a step removed from real-world engagement.
PO For sure. This framing is changing the way people live with Blackness. It’s a very soft vibration, but how do you think it affects the metaphysics of anti-blackness within the geological structures of our everyday?
DK I think about this a lot. I bang my head against the wall, trying to pinpoint the exact ways that I’m contributing to the dismantling of white supremacy. I think we’re all running with batons, just trying to take things further. We’re just here on Earth spilling what we have, putting it on display, passing it on for the next ones who dare to try to contribute. But I’m curious, did you aspire to work within the art world? Or did you just fall into it?
PO I’m such a firm believer that where my body takes me at any given moment is where I’m supposed to be. I feel like it’s the way of my world. I’m a poet, and everything I make is just an extension of the poem itself. Who knows where this approach might lead me? Hopefully, towards anything I desire [laughs]. Art is truly everything. We have to fragment; split a little.
DK That’s why our experience in Iceland was so special to me; it really opened my eyes! The artwork (Fragmented sky – wind – fly giving presence to wind, 2023) was actually me and you being together at that lighthouse, installing these bells in the brutally cold wind that was numbing our hands and faces, and having to take shelter inside the lighthouse every thirty minutes or so to recalibrate and breathe; that was the fucking art! The entire experience of creating that work became the work, and I wasn’t thinking quite like that before.
PO Yes, it’s the falling and the getting up. All the moments we create collectively become notes for this endless poem. I’m always daydreaming of ways I can collectively build with my friends. Our Iceland project was an example of that.
DK It was pure.
PO I don’t know if people know this about you, but you take a lot of photos.
DK I feel like my photos kind of become the more authentic version of how I witnessed certain moments. I wait for the urge to snap the camera to creep up on me, which means that I really have to feel something, and then looking at the image allows me to re-access what I was feeling when I had the urge.
PO I love that side of you. I’ve noticed that you’re always watching. You stay quiet, and you take in everything.
DK [laughs] Oh god. You can see that? I’m just super sensitive to everything that I’m seeing.
PO You’re a really good archiver. I think about your work as you being sensitive and just hunting through the world and having visceral responses to the things you see. Have you read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive: After the End of the World (2018)?
DK I haven’t.
PO It’s about an archivist going through the rubble of what’s left on earth. I think about your work in relation to that. Tell me, what’s moving you right now?
DK: Ummm… What’s moving me right now?
PO What’s changing you?
DK Damn, you know what it is? Pain.
PO Okay. Tell me more.
DK The past five days, I’ve been running towards pain. Anything that physically or emotionally hurts or brings me anguish. It’s what I’ve been teaching myself to embrace, and it’s definitely changing me.
PO Is pain a difficult emotion for you to process?
DK Yes, because it’s always been tricky to notice where the pain is. I’m thinking about all the times as a kid when I was hurting but didn’t have the understanding. Like when we moved to the suburbs, and suddenly, I’m the random small, shy African kid who’s left out of everything. I’m just wondering how that’s showing up now because I had no clue I was hurting back then.
PO It teaches you a different way of survival. I’ve come to a similar understanding where I had no idea how to process my anger until I started boxing a year ago. I just pretend not to feel the emotion. Pain has a similar effect where you can just remove your mind and almost try and escape it, which sort of works if you’re able to dissociate enough.
DK It worked for so long, but now I’m attacking it. Not only emotional pain but physical pain, too. I’ve been waking up at 5 a.m., and the only way I can get my body out of bed is by embracing the anguish of it. But I feel like you’re light years ahead of me on this topic.
PO I’m rewiring my brain. It’s ritual and discipline for me right now. I wake up at 7 a.m. and meditate, then head to the gym for two and a half hours being crazy, manically throwing weights around. I’ve been embracing difficulty and understanding that discipline is the only way to have order and structure in my life.
DK It makes sense that you meditate because discipline can only be enacted when your mind is clear.
PO Clarity as a new form of chaos. When I know what I want, I’m so powerful that I can dream endlessly. The chaos that this energy creates is my Utopia. I used to spend so much time and energy caring for other people, but I now understand that this ritual and discipline mentality actually reinforces the energy I get to put into my art, which enhances how my work can serve others.
DK I feel that.
PO We’re in our rigorous discipline era [laughs].
DK Fuck yeah! 2024 shit!
