Nikesha Breeze: Four Sites of Return: Ritual | Remembrance | Reparation | Reclamation

I am an American-born descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and first generation Assyrian immigrants from Iran. My work investigates the interrelationality and resilience of the Black and Queer body in relationship to power, vulnerability, the sacred and the ancestral. My work is deeply ritual and process-based, with a strong attention to detail, craft and materiality.

The Arc of Return is a life-size wooden boat covered in hundreds of hand-etched and patinated copper plates. Each plate is inscribed with Afrofuturist writing codecs, spirit writing, prayers and sacred symbols of the diaspora. The boat is both a symbol of eternal return for African diasporic bodies and an active site of Black perpetuity. It cradles The Black Goddexx of Time, a hand-etched and patinated copper plate, and is encircled by The Sanctuary of Wound.

In this work I am exploring the Black American image through the lens of the first recorded photographs of Black people in the United States. Drawing upon early daguerreotype, tintype and emulsion photos dating as far back as 1840, I am reclaiming the images, often of slaves, laborers, craftspeople and children, and rendering them in full scale oil paintings, as a way to impart the honoring and recognition that these early Black ancestors may have never received in their own time.

Here in this altar space, you are invited to share in communal prayer and ritual practice. The “tree of forgetting” sought to mystically cut our ancestors from their roots. To disappear the invisible cords to their origins. This tree serves as a place to mythically bind the spirit back to its source. It is a place of prayer, and of honoring all that has been lost. A place to give offerings towards all of our futures. To make reparations and to remember.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, written in 1899, is a racist book. Conrad himself was a white man, a racist, a white supremacist and for all intents and purposes, a talented writer. Conrad, as artist, used his gift to both invisibilize and grossly misrepresent and dehumanize African people and their lands and customs.

108 Death Masks is a large-scale ceramic installation centered on the living experience of shared wound. I created 108 life-sized, hand-carved ceramic Death Masks as a ritual prayer for my lost and unknown ancestors. 108 is understood as a sacred number of endlessness and prayer. The number was used in this work to represent the endlessness of suffering in communities of color due to systematic racial violence, oppression and white supremacy. Simultaneously, it represents the endless capacity of prayer and conscious care to move backwards and forwards in time. 

Hand Tools of Resilience is an international juried exhibition that appears throughout Nikesha Breeze’s Four Sites of Return. The project invited African diasporic and Indigenous artists to examine the conscious and unconscious tools that Black and Indigenous people have created to survive, thrive and build within oppressive and abusive systems. Artists from across the world conceptualized new tools with Afrofuturistic functionalities. They are tools that might extinguish gaslighting or passive racist treatment, or shields that represent covert and overt armor and talismans. They are wedges for loosening systems of supremacy and abuse, or chisels for shaping new Black and Indigenous realities.

Convened by Nikesha Breeze, the Hand Tools of Resilience jury included Rose B. Simpson, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Le’Andra LeSeur and Isra Rene. Visit handtoolsofresilience.com for more information.