mud & butterflies

Galeria Catinca Tabacaru is delighted to present mud & butterflies, Chioma Ebinama’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first presence in Bucharest, Romania.

Dear beloved, I’m gathering mud around me.

At first, I abhorred it. I forgot I was an earth-bound being. I thought I could be weightless, forever. I believed in the infinite.

But now I’ve made the mud my blanket. Yes, I’m warm and calm in that nutritive muck. I had a tickling memory of kingdoms built of mud, of drinking and eating of vessels made of mud, of mud in my hair. Now, I’m returning home, to the mud.

The alchemic matter is gathering under my nails. My fingers are relaxed. I feel the flutter of butterflies land on my eyelids. I am dreaming of a sacred lotus, rising out of the mud, radiant and sweet in the morning—a rebirth.

With love, the water child is meeting the earth.

CHIOMA EBINAMA (b. 1988, USA)

Chioma Ebinama is a Nigerian-American artist interested in how animism, mythology, and precolonial philosophies present a space to articulate a vision of freedom outside of Western social and political paradigms. Her practice is centered around watercolors on paper, which explore drawing and visual narrative as a meditative practice and tool for self-liberation. Her work is influenced by a myriad of sources, from West African cosmology, to folk art of the global South, to the visual language of Western religion and Eastern spiritual traditions. This collision of aesthetics is indicative of Ebinama’s nomadic life, where in her travels, she has collaborated with local artists to make textiles, sculptures, and wearable art.

Ebinama has mounted solo exhibitions at Catinca Tabacaru in New York City (2018), Boys’ Quarters Project Space in Port Harcourt, Nigeria (2019), Fortnight Institute NYC (2020), and The Breeder in Athens (2020). In 2021, she will mount projects with Catinca Tabacaru in Bucharest, Maureen Paley in London, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de la Haute-Vienne in France. Her work has been acquired by foundations and collections internationally, and makes part of the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Catinca Tabacaru Gallery represents Chioma Ebinama in collaboration with Fortnight Institute.