“Ikenga statues were not intended as museum objects. Each figure functioned as a technology for focusing your will and manifesting your trajectory. I designed the eⁱKENGA figures to sit with you, to remind you of the person you are meant to become.” Nwankwo says. “If Pop Mart out of Asia can create a global language of collectible figures, then why doesn’t Africa have one? With a medium as popular and ubiquitous as it is among its demographic, this becomes an issue of representation.
eⁱKENGA is an exhibition of bronze sculptures by Nigerian-American artist Victor Nwankwo. The work is built around Ikenga, a shrine figure central to Igbo cosmology and documented since the ninth century CE. The Igbo are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, with a civilization rooted in what is now southeastern Nigeria, and a tradition of distributed governance, trade, and sophisticated visual culture that long predates European contact. Shrines in communal settings as well as in private homes articulated a belief system that places individual agency at its center rather than submission to divine will. Each Ikenga was carved to hold a person to account: a physical reminder of the behavioural and moral attributes a person need embody in order to achieve their aspirations and become a valuable contributor to the community.
An Ikenga asks its audience or owner to act with integrity, to direct ambition toward something worthy. Nwankwo's sculptures ask the same of their audience in a world that makes integrity hard to sustain. No collectible object rooted in African visual culture has claimed a place in the global market alongside KAWS or Labubu. eⁱKENGA argues that the Igbo tradition, which has always understood that art, commerce, and moral life are inseparable, belongs there. Each figure in the suite embodies a guiding attribute:
Strength (Ikè)
Resilience (Ǹdìdì)
Voice (Olu)
Harmony (Ùdo)
Wisdom (Àmàmihe)
Joy (Ọṅụ̀)
Grace (Àmàrà)
The suite breaks down the overwhelmingly male convention of historical Ikenga production, restoring a spectrum of gender expression grounded in Nwankwo's research into pre-colonial Igbo social structures, before the constrictions of colonial and missionary intervention from the 1860s onwards.
The prefix eⁱ borrows from the mathematical notation for an imaginary number, allowing for the possibility for personal change to be described in an abstract dimension. eⁱKENGA treats art and spiritual technology as the same thing. Objects are understood to provide coordinates to access the intangible.
An Ikenga asks its audience or owner to act with integrity, to direct ambition toward something worthy. Nwankwo's sculptures ask the same of their audience in a world that makes integrity hard to sustain. No collectible object rooted in African visual culture has claimed a place in the global market alongside KAWS or Labubu. eⁱKENGA argues that the Igbo tradition, which has always understood that art, commerce, and moral life are inseparable, belongs there. Each figure in the suite embodies a guiding attribute:
Strength (Ikè)
Resilience (Ǹdìdì)
Voice (Olu)
Harmony (Ùdo)
Wisdom (Àmàmihe)
Joy (Ọṅụ̀)
Grace (Àmàrà)
The suite breaks down the overwhelmingly male convention of historical Ikenga production, restoring a spectrum of gender expression grounded in Nwankwo's research into pre-colonial Igbo social structures, before the constrictions of colonial and missionary intervention from the 1860s onwards.
The prefix eⁱ borrows from the mathematical notation for an imaginary number, allowing for the possibility for personal change to be described in an abstract dimension. eⁱKENGA treats art and spiritual technology as the same thing. Objects are understood to provide coordinates to access the intangible.