Lace no.10

Lace no.10 (2021) belongs to the Lace series that Onuzulike develops from thousands of hand-shaped ceramic beads made from palm kernel shells, then assembled with copper wire into large wall panels evoking West African prestige cloths — Akwete, Aso Oke, Kente — or imported European lace, equally prized in Africa as a marker of social status. This dual reference — ancestral African textile and colonial lace — lies at the heart of the artist's work, which interrogates the links between cultural identity, colonialism, economic hierarchies, and the transmission of knowledge. A practice as laborious as it is political, in which every bead is an act of memory. The artist is represented by Galerie Afikadiris, Paris.