Nneka Kai, Material Sounding the Dimensionality of A Thread June 23 - August 25, 2019
Nneka Kai
Material Sounding: The Dimensionality of a Thread
June 23 - August 25, 2019
Curated by Adia Sykes
Website: nnekakai.com
Instagram: @nneka_kai
In her first solo exhibition, Material Sounding: The Dimensionality of a Thread, Nneka Kai inserts her work into the realms of abstraction and performance, situating her practice within the discourses of Black feminist studies and craft. Through an in-depth study of improvisational music, Kai has developed a unique lexicon of aural patterns that are then translated into visual compositions. Sounds manifest in the form of these sound scores, each of them as diverse as the musical traditions from which they are derived.
Works from this aforementioned series are combined with unnamed Portals, structures that allude to String Theory’s notion of everything in the universe being made up of vibrating strings. These portals serve as gateways—collapsing linear time, complicating conventional perceptions of space, warping viewers to a different plane. The reverberation of the strings speaks to the thought that everything makes a sound, whether audible or not. These portals give sound structure and, in turn, lend an opacity to what is normally unseen.
Adia Sykes is a Chicago-based curator, arts administrator, and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a Master of Arts from the Department of Arts Administration and Policy. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016) with a focus on material culture and museums. Her current research interests include examining the history and potential of curatorial practice as an advocacy tool for racial equity in the arts and racial and gendered identities explored in the visual and performative practices of emerging artists. Her Master's thesis focused on formations of self-organized networks of support that exist to sustain the practices of historically marginalized artist communities and maps this contemporary ecosystem of support. Her curatorial work has been exhibited at The Sullivan Galleries, Woman Made Gallery, the Chicago Mayor’s Office, and ACRE Projects.
Artist Biography
Nneka Kai (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and writer whose practice examines the intersections of Black material culture, memory, labor, and the politics of representation. Working across sculpture, fiber, performance, installation, and social practice, she investigates how materials carry histories that exceed the archive, with particular attention to Black hair as a site of knowledge, care, and resistance. Kai received an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Textiles from Georgia State University. She is the recipient of the 2023 Artadia Award for Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions throughout Kentucky, California, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, and she has participated in numerous public performances, collaborative exhibitions, and curatorial projects. She is an adjunct professor in the Sculpture Department at Pratt Munson,
Artist Statement
Nneka Kai's studio practice is guided by the question: What constitutes a free Black feminine form? This inquiry begins with Black hair—as material, concept, and practice—and expands across sculpture, fiber, installation, sound, and performance. Rather than treating hair as a symbol alone, she understands it as a material that holds histories of labor, care, migration, resistance, and transformation while remaining open to continual reinvention.
She approaches making through textile thinking. Braiding, weaving, coiling, knotting, wrapping, and stitching become methods for investigating structure, tension, rhythm, and relation. These processes allow her to explore the possibilities and the impossibilities of how bodies, materials, and landscapes are shaped.
Working with found objects, reclaimed materials, and historically charged sites, she is drawn to the improvisational practice of "making somethin' outta nothin'"—a strategy of resourcefulness, survival, and invention rooted within Black cultural traditions. Through acts of collecting, assembling, and reconfiguring, she considers how materials carry memory and how objects can become a site where overlooked histories are encountered and reimagined.
Through abstraction, she seeks to expand the ways Black life can be seen, felt, and understood beyond prescribed images and fixed representations. Materiality, process, and spatial arrangement become forms of embodied knowledge—an "acting out" through which sculpture and performance activate memory, gesture, and collective experience.