Nenna Okore Talks AI, Installation & Nigerian Culture

Dr. Nenna Okore is an internationally acclaimed artist, known for her colorful sculptural installations that endlessly enrapture audiences, subsuming their architectural environments. She is a professor of Art at Chicago North Park University where she sits as chair of the Art department, teaching courses in Art Theory and Sculptural Practices.

I first met Nenna while working on a curatorial staff installing her show, Unbridled Encounters. Since then she has become my professor, mentoring me in my personal art practice. As I enter her office, the walls are covered from floor to ceiling in packed bookshelves and earthen sculptures. Various pieces of natural material are leaned against large books piled about our feet. Sitting in a chair beside her desk, I open our conversation ahead of her show Between Earth and Sky, now moving from the Royal Botanical Gardens in London to the Textile Museum in Augsburg.

You are someone who has lived in various countries and cultural landscapes. You were born in Australia and raised in Nigeria, and obviously you’ve now been living in the U.S. for some time. How has your practice served as a symbolic or tangible means of connecting you to the landscapes you inhabit? How does place-ness arise in the physicality of your practice?

Mmm, I like that question. One thing that I find common to all the places I’ve lived or been to is that you get to meet people. And in meeting people you get to learn a lot. And I think that those are all kind of a part of what helps you form your perspectives in life. The places you go to in one way or another will shape your understanding of the physicality of the space, the environment of the space as well, and you tend to embody or take on some of its historical importance, right? And that kind of begins to formulate how you think about things. As an artist, you want to create work that can speak to all kinds of people. And so all kinds of people also need to influence how you think about the work and how you make your work. And so I think that when I find myself traveling to different locations, not even just the places I was born and lived in and walked in, I find that it is so important for me to immerse myself in the social environment, the social landscape, right? I get to learn what people are doing, how they see things, how their experiences affect their understanding of different things, and those experiences I've come to learn also influence me in one way or another. So I think in a way, the experiences are subsumed. So wherever I go, I'm assimilating. I'm picking up things. I'm taking away different registers, whether it's material-wise or culturally or historically, and I'm embedding them back into my practice one way or another.

To be more specific, when I think about Nigeria, this is a very culturally rich place. And so that kind of creates a foundation for my cultural awareness. I go into that consciousness to tap into that for my art. A place like Australia I think environmentally is so beautiful, and the people are so self-aware of how the environment enriches their own experiences. They always kind of have an ode to the natural environment, and they have a healthy respect for the indigenous cultures. Somewhere like here, it's through my classroom that I really get to learn so much. So I feel like it's all interlinked, and I have to be able to create art that people can relate to from any part of the world. By knowing what people are experiencing across the world, that helps me to build that language.

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. Your work makes me feel a lot of longing threaded through themes of home— understanding what home is to the different communities that you work with, and expressed through the landscape and the materials. And then also this longing for the earth as a home that is sustainable.

And I think that's what I mean when I talk about the resonance that I feel [Nigeria] generates— when I am in Nigeria versus here, nature is more present, for instance. When I'm in those places, I feel like I can tap into the energy of the space because of how raw things are. I feel the earth spirit a lot stronger. And depending on where I go across the world, it does bring back this feeling of deep connections to the natural forces, in a way that makes me remember what I experienced as a child, because I spent a lot of time outdoors. I did. I loved just being out, digging in the soil, picking up stones, looking at insects— dead insects, and finding strange things like that. That was my joy! And I think all of that informed how I make— how I think.

So I think that that connects, and you're kind of already answering this, but it connects to a question that I have about where your environmental consciousness arises from, and whether that has roots in your upbringing, spirituality, cultural background, or something else.

Definitely. I think the foundational background of growing up in a place where the land was highly respected had a great impact. People generally believe that all objects, all materials, all land forms, stones, skies, water, have a spirituality about them, and so I grew up with that awareness, and that informed how I approached the Earth with a lot of care and an interest in reciprocity.

I'm sorry, I might digress, because I get emotional about these things: I remember my grandmother, [she] lived in a really rural homestead. I was going to visit her, and in the morning, she would wake me up, and she'd [say], Hey, you know, go and get the broom. And the broom was usually a bunch of long pines that were kind of held together. And [I’d] use the broom to sweep up all the leaves, and then they'd be taken to the garden and the manure there. It was very interesting to me to think about how the leaves provide for us. They shed their waste, and we pick them all up, and we take them and we put them in the garden to replenish the environment. And that is the way that nature teaches us about how we should live, and how we should be sustainable, right? So I always had that understanding that nothing ever goes to waste. All of those things are sort of where the subconsciousness has stemmed from, and it continues to support my research in different ways. Yeah, makes sense?

Yes! That's a wonderful answer. That kind of leads me to think about our previous conversations regarding AI. I wonder, coming from your ethos of environmentalism and connectivity, how have you been thinking about AI as exploitative versus generative?

Every new technology is very scary. I’m worried about the implications environmentally, but at the same time, I think that it is important to pause to understand it first before we critique it. So even though I'm afraid of it, even though all I want to do is to reject it, I'm being very pragmatic by saying, you know what, let's try to understand what this thing can do, so we can know if it's something that would potentially improve our craft or help us to understand who we are better, because it's here to stay, right?

The one thing I feel confident about with regard to AI disrupting my own practice, is that I think that there will always be a need for us to be materially connected or resonant with the world around us, and that probably will never go away. Like there's never a time when we're just going to be in this virtual cyberspace, you know, without having to touch things, without having to make things. So I feel confident about the fact that, because I make with my hands, that [my art practice] is not just going to go away and is really important to the conversation. The artist's skill will not be easily overrun by this— this machine. I feel hopeful that it isn't something I need to despair about. Because people want to be embodied within their environment. They want to be able to make things and resolve problems materially and connect socially. So AI is there in the background with all the noise, but I feel like I'm gonna stay and become comfortable with that disturbance and keep trying to cut out my own comfort place within all of that— knowing that there are so many people who are also longing for the same thing. That people still have a relevance in the conversation.

What do you consider to be your ethical responsibility in the context of socially engaged art?

There is a view that I have, that as an artist, it is my job and my responsibility to follow a culture of care for people, and also to kind of create an enabling environment where people have a voice. And by that, I mean for them to be able to articulate what they're thinking in ways that they may not necessarily do on a regular basis because they don't have those opportunities. So when people come together like the way you and I are speaking together to talk about these matters of environmental problems, there is a certain sort of calmness that allows people to reach in deep and and really resolve things that they probably haven't really thought about.

It isn't just enough for [artists] to say: we make the work, we put it out, and people come and enjoy it and go. Without interactions and deep thinking, the tectonic plates do not shift. Things do not move. And this kind of brings me back to thinking about my culture as well, where that connection is so crucial in building up society. Without an acknowledgement of the next person, without trying to listen, to hear what the materials are saying, or the land is saying, then there's no wholeness in the experience. And I think it's really, really important for us to have these dialogues across the different planes, because that's what really helps to shift things, if you will. I want interactions where even the spirit of the space becomes part of the experience, right?

Do you find that especially difficult in the American context of individualism and disconnectedness?

Ohhh yeah. Definitely! I mean, coming from a non-western perspective where people are deeply entrenched or immersed in each other and the environment, I find that here there’s a very individualistic, self-driven kind of approach to things. There is a sense that you live in your own space, your own house, and you put a fence around it.

Yes, everything is so separate.

Yes, so separate, individual. I call it a settler mindset because that’s what the colonial experience brought to different indigenous spaces. Many indigenous people believe in the human and natural connections, but that has sort of been eroded over time. When you look at old indigenous cultures, the art that they make is not the kind of art that you just display in a glass case— there is this whole spiritual, physical, and material encounter and embodiment with the object. These indigenous cultures knew how to engage with the natural environment much more than the West did. But Western values came and cut that—they undermined it.

It stuns me how whenever I go into a museum I become so stiff, I can’t relax. I want to touch it, I want to pick it up— but I can’t!

And even when you can, there are rules for engagement.

Rules for engagement! Thank you, exactly, it’s all of that stuff— which I think really takes away from the beauty of engagement and connection. So, when I make my work I think about all these things. How can I get people to engage? How can I get people to touch it or smell it? To enjoy its beauty and its ambience and not be afraid of it.

I remember when I first met you through curating your show. [The gallery director] and I were working with you and we were both very apprehensive about touching the material and then you were just walking on top of it.

Nenna Okore Laughs

You were like “Oh no, just touch it! Walk on it! Walk on it!” I think the background that you bring to socially engaged work is important as a political force because it does move people to a place of collectivism which is very important for political activation.

Can you tell me about the recent show that you had at the Royal Botanical Gardens in London, Between Earth and Sky, which is now moving to the Textile Museum in Augsburg, Germany?

The idea was to use inspiration from the Botanical Garden. It’s one of the largest temperate houses in the world, and the place where I exhibited my work is the single largest temperate house. So it's really big and it comprises four different gardens from different regions of the world, and in those gardens I was asked to look at the plants and get some inspiration for the forms that I would create. So that's what inspired me to create those floral forms, they were based off of flowers and plants that I saw in the garden. Conceptually I was really thinking about all of these deeper issues like sustainability and the risk of us losing track of how we are so connected to this planet from the land we stand on all the way to the sky. I was trying to remind people of the need to pause and think about these things and also just admire nature and see that nature has so much power—it can teach us the way forward if we really can slow down and pay attention.

This conversation has been edited for brevity. All images courtesy of the artist.