Acclaimed artist Victor Ehikhamenor, who represented Nigeria at its first Venice Biennale pavilion in 2017, makes his Australian debut with Undoing the City, Making Home at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. 

Presented in partnership with Blacktown Arts, the exhibition brings together new and recent works exploring migration, displacement and belonging.

For Ehikhamenor, art operates as an archive – preserving stories and experiences that may be absent from official historical records. He invites audiences to consider not only what museums collect and preserve, but whose histories are represented, who has the authority to interpret cultural heritage, and what happens when this is brought into dialogue with contemporary artistic practice.

“Material objects from Sydney and elsewhere form a constellation of diverse yet singular voices in my installation. When a neighbourhood disappears, the loss goes beyond architecture. People lose the sites where their stories live, giving way to new relationships interwoven with fragments of the past. 

“I am interested in what people who experience this hold on to, and how art can shorten the distance between centuries of memories.”

Undoing the City, Making Home connects the experiences of communities in Nigeria and Australia with broader questions of migration, belonging, memory and the struggle to make home in changing cities.

Ehikhamenor’s large-scale textile, Numinous Night (2025), uses hundreds of black rosaries crossed by yellow lines to evoke the city at night, the Niger Delta, and the movement of oil, people and borders. The rosaries represent migrants as individuals who carry their own histories while forming new communities and pathways.

A series of small drawings created in cities including Port Harcourt and Sydney explores water as a route of departure and arrival, reflecting the fragmented nature of memory and questioning the systems that determine who can move, belong and make a home.

Soundscapes created by the Port Harcourt-based community initiative Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform /Chicoco Collective complete the exhibition, immersing audiences in the environments and experiences that underpin Ehikhamenor’s work.

Curated by Dr Paul Donnelly (Chau Chak Wing Museum), with support from Anne-Louise Dadak and Talia Smith (Blacktown Arts), the exhibition is an outcome of research led by University of Sydney Associate Professor Lucia Sorbera and University of California, Irvine Professor Mark LeVine, whose research explores colonial and postcolonial regimes and creative responses to forced urban change and displacement.

Dr Donnelly said bringing Ehikhamenor's work to the Museum offered an opportunity to create a dialogue between contemporary African artistic practice, historical collections and the complex histories museums hold.

“Victor’s first art exhibition in Sydney has also been a catalyst to collaborate with Blacktown Arts whose programs provide key professional development opportunities for Western Sydney artists to share ideas, knowledge and creative practice with a renowned African artist.”

The partnership includes a mentorship program with emerging creatives from African communities across Western Sydney, enabling an exchange ideas and creative practices with Ehikhamenor.

“Africa is not a place frozen in the past or trapped in the trauma of colonial history; it is the beating heart of contemporary cultural production,” said Associate Professor Sorbera.

“Its demography and its cultural diversity, nourished by millennia of transregional connections make it one of the richest spaces to confront the enduring legacies of history.”

“Examining these dynamics from an Australian perspective creates a vital transnational dialogue, showing how historical extractivism and local resistance are not isolated events, but shared global challenges that demand new creative responses today.” 

Professor LeVine said of Ehikhamenor’s work: “From the moment I encountered Victor’s work over a dozen years ago, it was both deeply rooted, unmistakably contemporary, and pointing to a future beyond the tragedies of the present. Its global relevance as well as resonance with the history and present-day dynamics in Australia are equally clear.”

Mayor of Blacktown, Councillor Brad Bunting, said: “Blacktown City is a large and fast-growing city of 460,000 residents, many different communities call it home. We want to give emerging artists from those communities the opportunity to develop their work. Through Blacktown Arts, this partnership gives local artists the chance to work with Victor, who has built an international career while maintaining a strong connection to his culture.

“It is a valuable opportunity for emerging artists in Blacktown and Western Sydney to exchange ideas and learn from his experience as they find their own direction.”

_{The project is co-produced by the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Blacktown Arts and Blacktown City Council, with support from the NSW Government through Create NSW and the University of Sydney's Vere Gordon Childe Centre.}