The Migrant Open Editions by Ken Nwadiogbu

In playful colours and simples forms, Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Ken Nwadiogbu critically addresses the issue of migration, inviting us to embrace new perspectives. Using personified cardboard boxes as vivid metaphors of black migrants, he plays around with the parcels’ disposable nature, underlining the dehumanisation process at work in the migration politics. Like boxes, black bodies used to be stacked up in ships and traded oversea. Today, these same bodies are paying fortunes to pile up in dreadful rafts, with the insane hope to reach alive the shore of a continent that keeps fighting them back.

Tackling the migration issue requires us to critically re-examine our collective representations, and decentre our perspectives. As much as it is only the symptom of much deeper causes, migration however serves as a convenient scapegoat, deflating the bullet of our collective responsibilities to tackle the core challenges our societies, both in the North and in the Souths, are at grips with in this globalised, post-colonial world: war, climate change, food insecurity, economic inequalities, corruption.

‘The Migrant’ is a collection of a 5 NFTs by Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Ken Nwadiogbu, powered by the female led Nigerian art gallery Retro Africa. Three of ‘The Migrant’ NFTs are to be sold through a ranked auction, the highest bidder for each NFT would also be eligible to receive the original sculpture that inspired the NFT. The remaining two NFTs would be open editions. Curated by Maurice CHAPOT and Dolly Kola-Balogun, ’The Migrant’ is part of the artist’s ongoing cross-reality project ‘Journey Mercies’, launched in the metaverse in November of 2021, and later continued in the physical space with successful exhibitions in the UK, the US and Nigeria.

These open edition artworks will run throughout the remainder of The Migrant exhibition and will be minted/delivered to collectors on June 23rd.