an Exhibition of FiVE Conversations: Nkata Podcast: Art & Processes

Nkata is the Igbo word for conversation. In Okereke’s practice, conversation is not simply an interview format or a finished record. It is an artistic method through which the voice gathers, arranges and transmits embodied knowledge; a way of staying with a person, their practice and the events that have shaped their movement in the world.

For this installation, five long-form conversations with Akinbode Akinbiyi, Jihan El-Tahri, Otobong Nkanga, Olu Oguibe and Koyo Kouoh are brought into one spatial composition. Each voice is accompanied by a photographic portrait and a dotted route that descends from the wall, meanders across the floor and arrives at a listening position. The routes cross without resolving into a single line. To listen, the visitor must enter the cartography and locate their body within it.

At the centre, five leaning black pillars gather beneath a suspended light. They hold the headphones and depend upon one another as a structure. Five seats surround them, recalling a gathering around a fireplace or beneath the moonlight: a perceptual space of togetherness in which stories can be heard. The pillars also invoke the speakers themselves, whose recollections carry what Okereke calls “the hums of our humanity.”

These conversations do not proceed as linear biographies. They move through memory, vocation, displacement, inheritance, creative labour, institution building and the difficult work of remaining responsive to the world. Their rhythm follows the ebb and flow of lived experience. Okereke’s questions and interjections do not force an outcome; they act as pointers of orientation, allowing each voice to find its own bearings.

The installation makes the archive perform itself. What began as an encounter between two people becomes sound, image, a line moving through space, a body listening, and then another possible departure. Episode 01 with Akinbode Akinbiyi, for instance, independently moves towards Okereke’s film I Wonder As I Wander and towards this installation. The conversation remains the originating node, while each later form follows its own trajectory.

First presented from 2 March to 28 April 2024 at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein as part of A Home for Something Unknown, the installation marks one enactment of an ongoing work. NKATA continues to expand through sound, writing, image, film, pedagogy and further conversations; its routes remain open to return, rearrangement and renewed listening.