Samuel Nnorom Nigerian, b. 1990

Samuel Nnorom has participated in numerous workshops and artist residencies in England, South Africa, and Nigeria, notably joining the G.A.S. Foundation in 2022 — the residency founded by Yinka Shonibare, whose renowned exploration of wax fabrics resonates strongly with Nnorom’s own practice. He has also taken part in several group exhibitions and art fairs between Nigeria and France and has been commissioned multiple times for public artworks in his home country. Nnorom is a three-time winner of the Life in My City Art Festival and was awarded first prize at iCreate Africa in 2019. In December 2022, he was named the overall winner of the annual international art ini- tiative Art for Change Prize, with his work selected from over 2,500 submissions across 130 countries.

He discovered his artistic talent at the age of nine while assisting his father in his shoemaking work- shop, where he began creating life drawings of the customers who visited the shop. He was also influen- ced by his mother’s tailoring studio, where, as a child, he played with colorful fabrics, needles, and threads. From an early age, the elements that now define his contemporary artistic practice surrounded him. Describing himself as a “custodian of material culture,” Nnorom explores materiality in a distincti- ve way, dedicating his art to textile recycling and a sociological reflection on the human condition. Throu- gh actions such as sewing, tying, and cutting, the emerging artist creates intricate constellations of fabric-covered foam spheres, meticulously stitched together, evoking a metaphor for the “fabric of so- ciety” — composed of closed social structures that form the bubbles in which our daily lives are enclosed.

Nnorom poetically navigates the boundaries between textile, painting, and sculpture, using Ankara fabrics, whose origins are complex within the history of the African continent, to explore their shifting symbolism and to reclaim a contemporary material omnipresent within his community. He is deeply interested in the identity and meaning embodied by fabrics, particularly the Ankara fabric, widely used in his local community and across West Africa. For him, fabric suggests a social structure or organization that weaves humanity into society; in the case of the “social fabric” or “fabric of society,” it takes on characteristics unique to each context, while the bubble repre- sents a structure that holds or preserves something for a limited period of time. His mission is to engage viewers, prompting them to question the socio-political structures and human conditions that define our lives — what truth and conspiracy truly mean within our everyday existence, wrapped in the bubbles of contemporary living.

Bubbles, in fact, are elements or structures that contain or preserve something only temporarily. By merging the fluid history of Ankara fabric with the encapsulated structure of the bubble and what it represents, Nnorom invites the audience to reflect on the individual narrative that each of his works conveys. Importantly, these sculptures are not confined to the history of Ankara fabric; rather, that history provides the foundation upon which the artist builds his creative discourse, intertwining personal experiences, recent events, futuristic visions, and global contexts.