Nnena Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence. They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snaggling details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings. The closer you get to Kalu’s endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. Their containment is precarious. So full of life and energy, you think they might burst.
Kalu’s art is so embodied, so sensuous, so much a trace of her constant, physical engagement, so much a negotiation between the body that made it and the bodies she creates, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the activity of making and the thing itself. This was true, too, in the figures Giacometti made in his room filled with plaster dust. But Kalu’s art is not reducible to anything we might call a technique, and comparisons with other artists are not much help.
