Sakhile&Me presents ‘I Am All the Loves I Have Ever Known’, a contemplative gesture towards self-actualisation and self-recognition in and through relationship with others and place. The exhibition centers ecology as a way of thinking, perceiving, relating and understanding while tracing encounters and symbiotic relationships found in the natural environment within personal, interpersonal and collective experiences. The curatorial concept was triggered by a title of one of Louise Mandumbwa’s works, ‘All the Loves I Have Known’ (inspired in turn by a Toni Morrison quote, ‘I am all the things I have ever loved.’ The exhibition is open at Sakhile&Me, Frankfurt, Germany until the 01st of February 2025.
‘I Am All the Loves I Have Ever Known’ speaks to an ecological mindset which considers intersections of structure and improvisation within continuous cycles and iterations of destruction, decomposition, repair and renewal – the ways in which labor, love and leisure are intertwined in our conceptions of caretaking, caregiving, work and play. The literal and figurative borrowing from ecology encourages a close consideration of the smallest of elements in the grand scheme of things, the notes strung together in a melody, the banter between friends, the mulching of soil before planting, the underlayer or sketch marks beneath a painting, or the wire skeleton holding up a layered fibre body.
With that said, Louise Mandumbwa’s works in the exhibition are portraits of beloved friends and family members painted in oil but with the tenderness of a pencil or charcoal drawing. These are shown alongside a panel piece incorporating fragments of plant life, a nod to the gardens Mandumbwa recalls as home and featured in her poem whose name inspired the exhibition name. In the poem Mandumbwa speaks of her mother’s gardens, the plants in the gardens and the gardens themselves not only as part of home, but as holding space for a sensorial recollection, a memory of home that is both embodied and ephemeral.
Louise Mandumbwa (b. 1996) is an American visual artist and facilitator of Zambian ancestry working in the mediums of painting, printmaking and drawing. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Central Arkansas and an MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in publications such as New Wave Magazine (UK) and New American Paintings. She has exhibited in the US, Beijing and London. Mandumbwa is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields grant from Yale University, and the Gene Hatfield Outstanding Individual Artist Award from the Conway Alliance for the Arts. Mandumbwa has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and the Chautauqua School of Art. Her research, production and teaching is invested in a network of relationships as experiential mapping and reframing gaps in the collective memory with the affective and anecdotal.
In ecological considerations, human interactions and relationships occur in concert with, for better or worse, the broader natural environment, in body, in mind – embodied. There is a gentle invitation to understand human beings as being part of nature, embodied in it, and that nature is itself an unyielding force that has the capacity to engulf, consume and regenerate itself. Nnenna Okore’s wall-engulfing installation ‘When All Is Said and Done’ is made from burlap, dye, wire and yarn and it explores and utilises the inherent physicality, durability and apparent fragility and flexibility of burlap and wire. The textured sculpture sprouts from the walls like an organism growing outward to meet the space, inviting the viewer to contemplate the passing of time, through growth, death, decay and re-growth – perhaps mimicking life forms drawn from the viewer’s own memories and imagination. The two-part sprawling piece comprises of billowing waves of stretched natural fibre layeres shaped on a black wire frame, with root-like forms of swooping and entangled threads in hues of red, dark purple, and brown.
Nnenna Okore was born in Australia in 1975 to parents from Ututu, Nigeria. At age four, she moved back to Nigeria with her parents who began working at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. Okore graduated from Primary and Secondary School in Nigeria before moving to Swaziland, now Eswatini, where her father took on a position for the United Nations and where Okore attended Waterford Kamhlaba United World College. In 1994, Nnenna Okore won first prize at the UNIFEM Women’s Art Contest and got to travel to Dakar, Abuja and Beijing. She enrolled in the Fine and Applied Arts undergraduate program at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka in 1995 and graduated as Valedictorian of her class in 1999. In 2002, she began her graduate studies in Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, obtaining her Master of Arts degree in Sculpture in 2004 and her Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture in 2005.
She has also received several fellowships and awards such as the UNESCO-Aschberg Fellowship for Artists awarded by the Gruber Jez Foundation in Mérida, Mexico in 2006; a fellowship at the Global Art Village in Delhi, India in 2007; a fellowship at the Jean Paul Blachère Foundation in Apt, France in 2010; and a Fulbright Scholar Award to the University of Lagos, Nigeria in 2012. Okore lives and works both in the United States and Nigeria and has exhibited in more than 100 exhibitions world-wide over the past two decades. Her works are part of several notable collections, such as the World Bank’s Art Collection, the Newark Museum, the Jean Paul Blachère Foundation, the Indianapolis Art Center and the Royal Collections in Abu Dhabi. ‘I Am All the Loves I Have Ever Known’ is a three person exhibition and the third exhibiting artist is Nicolas Coleman whose works center around music and summertime. The compositions all include figures in an interior space with a window looking out to a different landscape: mountains, gardens, and the blues of water and skies.
