Emeka Okereke

The Practice

It begins with image-making, initially through photography, but it does not resolve there. Photography gave me an early language for approaching the world: a way of attending to light, bodies, distance and the conditions of an encounter. I often say that it was the form through which I became available to the gift of perception.

I think of it as a point of departure rather than a discipline to which everything must return. An image may continue into writing, film, sound, conversation, teaching, installation, digital media or the creation of a collective platform. The form transmutes according to what the enquiry requires.

Orientation. Encounter. Relation. Stewardship.

For more than twenty years, I have been preoccupied with the space between Self and Other—not as an empty interval, but as a charged and unstable place with the capacity of a void, holding many invisibles and incongruent tendencies. It is where projections arise, where boundaries are sensed, where one body encounters another, and where the certainty of a fixed position can begin to falter.

The work does not seek to produce a definitive image of a person, place or condition. It asks what becomes possible when we remain attentive to the relation itself. This attention takes the form of stewardship—or, better still, its Igbo corollary, Nlekota, which loosely translates as “to look at holistically.”

Orientation is the continuous act of finding a bearing without assuming that there is one predetermined destination.

I will explain it through the Igbo saying, “Onye ajụjụ anaghị efu ụzọ”—one who questions never misses their way. This questioning is not reducible to a quest for an answer. It is, rather, a guidance system: an orientation device.

I am less interested in arriving at a conclusive outcome than in creating conditions through which another movement is perpetually inferred. Each photograph, film, essay, conversation or gathering is an emanation that holds the possibility of an encounter with the Self, the Other and the world. This movement may continue in a direction that the work neither predicts nor controls.

Questioning, in this sense, is not indecision. It is a way of remaining responsive to the world.

A border is never only a visible line. It is also an instruction: where one body should stand, where another must stop, what may be approached and what must remain apart.

Once space is measured as the separation between two positions, distance comes into being. Over time, that measurement hardens into territories, identities, disciplines and ways of organising reality. The world comes to be perceived through separation.

We live in a time of volatile negotiation between the past and the present. What is in contention is the transcendence of a world deeply enmeshed in the logic of separation as an organising principle.

As we invent technologies that bring us not only intensively but extensively into each other, what do we make of the measurements we impose upon space, of which distance is the by-product?

My work inhabits the implications of this distance. It attends to the paradox that every boundary that claims to separate also creates a place of contact—the possibility of encounter. Every line produces an edge where one side remains implicated in the other.

The body is not simply the bearer of an identity. It is a moving, sensing and thinking-active entity. It receives the world through light, memory, language, intuition, violence and desire. It is also the surface upon which histories and projections are inscribed.

I am interested in the body's sensitivity to demarcations that may not be immediately visible but are nevertheless felt. Its movement encounters the demand to be recognised, named, positioned and made legible. Yet the body also exceeds those projections. It hesitates, adapts, remembers, refracts and finds another way through.

I do not begin by deciding that something will become a photograph, film, essay or installation. I follow the enquiry until it finds the form through which it can continue.

Transdisciplinarity, for me, is therefore not the accumulation of mediums. It is a disposition—a willingness to move beyond the historical enclosures through which knowledge and creative practice have been divided.

An Igbo proverb says: “Since the hunter has learned to shoot without missing, the bird has learned to fly without perching.”

The bird remains in flight not because it has no grounding, but because the available perch has become a place of capture. Its movement is intention and intervention. It is an ahistorical way of being and moving in the world.

The iterative is the practice of returning without returning as the same person.

Another Igbo saying—“Ije dị mma, a ga ya ugboro abụọ”—tells us that when a journey, or path, is good, we walk it twice. Re-inscription does not necessarily indicate fixation. It may mean that something along the path remains alive and asks to be revisited.

But the aesthetics emerge from a cognisance of flow and rhythm. This also informs duration. Here, the works become indicators of the rhythm of one's movement in the world. Inadvertently, a cartography emerges: a collation of footprints that stay legible with every path trodden.

A work can reappear as a lecture, become part of an exhibition, produce an essay, film or installation, enter a conversation, or generate another work years later. Each return alters both the enquiry and the person undertaking it. The work remains unfinished not because it is incomplete, but because relation itself implies movement.

Invisible Borders, Nkata, Borderbeing, SEAD and other collective or research platforms are not peripheral to the artistic work. They are forms through which the work creates conditions for encounter. They also underscore transdisciplinarity as an ahistorical state of being and moving in the world.

History is held together through the institutions of disciplines. Yet the bird evoked earlier is the ahistorical bird: the bird that chooses to fly in the face of history.

Sometimes the appropriate artistic gesture is not to produce another object, but to create a structure through which people, knowledge and experiences can come into relation. This is where cultural production and systems design enter the practice.

I understand this increasingly as stewardship: tending to the conditions that allow something to emerge, circulate and continue beyond the person who initiated it.

I am interested in what becomes possible when one works from a trust in the innocence of the heart.

Much of the way the world is organised begins from suspicion: the need to establish motive, assign identity, distinguish right from wrong, and continually prove one's position. But what might the work become if it had nothing to prove?

It might become orientation: a sensitivity and response to the stimulus of the world. What is produced would not be evidence of a fixed position, but an articulation of movement—one possible way of sensing, questioning and passing through.

Or, simply, an indelible experience—sometimes as small as a mustard seed.

It asks nothing.

If a thing is what it says it is, it must survive nothingness. Otherwise, it is merely posing as the thing.

The work is what it says it is.