26 October 2024 – 19 January 2025
In October 2024, Chapter will present a new exhibition by artist Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye. This will be the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date and will focus on a new body of work that mobilises the history and visual language of self-portraiture, creating a boundless space for reimagining self-hood. Crashing the Glass Slippers centres the expansiveness of Eno-Amooquaye’s multidisciplinary artistic world and comes at a time of increasing recognition and interest in her practice; she was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2022 and had a solo exhibition, African Bird Dynasty at White Columns, New York in the same year.
For her Chapter exhibition, Eno-Amooquaye reflects on the construction of cultural icons, forging herself as a visionary through the creation of a cosmic world that cultivates personal histories, storytelling and the speculative. Working boldly between and beyond boundaries, the interplay of the visual, written and spoken word is central to Eno-Amooquaye’s practice. In this exhibition she brings new photography, drawings, textiles, fashion and performance together for the first time.
On display are a collection of sculptural garments including dresses, capes and trouser suits, all designed by the artist. Referencing historic costume and avant-garde couture, they feature her kaleidoscopic drawings. Worn and embodied by her in a striking series of photographic self-portraits and filmed performances, they become portals of transformation.
Also in the exhibition, a new collection of poems are performed to camera in a three screen installation. Developed following her exhibition African Bird Dynasty at White Columns and building on her experiences of New York City, they imagine the lives of cultural icons. Composed of collaged words and potent phrases such as ‘Union holds, protest touches’ and ‘The oak sounding as doorbell’, Eno-Amooquaye performs them wearing the garments on display. The dimensions of her voice, the rhythm of her words and inimitable presence hold a space of becoming, where we loosen from clear-cut meanings of language and listen anew – forming new connections between the words and world. We encounter lines from the poems in large flag-like silk hangings across the gallery space, where screen-printed text is accompanied by imagery depicting architecture, Yoruba and Ashanti sculpture and motifs from the natural world. Like her poems, these images knit a cosmology of memory and connections across place and time.
Eno-Amooquaye continually asks herself the question, “where do people find me in the exhibition when I am not there?”. Her extensive world-building, grounded in imagination, multi-sensorial experience and materiality make her ever-present.
Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye is a member of the London-based collective Intoart.
The exhibition opens on Saturday 26 October and we’ll be joined by Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye. Refreshments will be available.