Odera Igbokwe

Odera Igbokwe (they/them) is a painter and contemporary artist located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odera was born in 1990 of Igbo parents who immigrated to the lands of the Lenape people. As a result they are constantly excavating, responding, and envisioning in spite of the fractures that occur via diaspora. Their artwork is an exploration of storytelling through Afro-diasporic spiritualism, Black resilience, queer embodied transformations, redefining the archetypal hero’s journey, and how that relates to contemporary intersectional communities.

In their exhibition This Body of Mine, Odera Igbokwe explores the veil between physical and spiritual figuration. These works question and distill the embodiment of ancestral technologies with contemporary mundane tasks through the lens of the Black Queer body.

Resilience. Wonder and Awe. Repression. Pleasure. Invisibility and Hypervisibility. These paintings draw a throughline between the expectations and the spirit-led realities of Black and Queer intersections.