Ndidi Dike

[4] After her mandatory year in the National Youth Service, Dike made the choice of becoming a professional studio artist in her home of Owerri, the capital city Imo State, southeast Nigeria.

[5] Ndidi Dike uses her artistic ability to address and approach serious topics like slavery and colonialism, and the historical and continued impact of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

[5]This effort has also been extended into closely related topics like that of value, of both material goods and human life, that she has created recent exhibition pieces about.

She had two solo exhibitions in Lagos in 2008, which include Tapestry of Life: New Beginnings at the National Museum; and Waka-into-Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile for CCA.

Through her works in Waka-into-Bondage, Ndidi Dike sought to keep alive the memory of the epochal matter that led to the capture, enslavement, killing or death of some 21 million Africans.

[8] In a conversation with curator Bisi Silva about this exhibition, Dike said: "I visited Badagry in 2002 to see the slave route through which large numbers of our people were sent to the Americas to work daily, for long hours on plantations under subhuman conditions.

Dike’s experimentation with form led to the sculptural offering "Dwellings, Doors and Windows" in which she appropriated harbour pallets; she then broke them down to reconfigure the materials in a manner that evoked the Middle Passage.

Dike announced in an interview after her 2008 exhibition that she aimed to further explore this issue in her future works: "As I stated earlier, slave trading may have been abolished by the British parliament 200 years ago, but it is still in practice in certain countries.

[6] Dike's career includes international residencies such as Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, Illinois, USA), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK), TENQ in Senegal, Africa '95 programme, Gasworks (London), Jogja Biennale XIII: Hacking Conflict 2015 (Indonesia), Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth, Germany 2018), Villa Vasilieff Penord Ricard Fellow in 2017 (Paris), Tate Modern (London).