Art Basel Miami Beach: Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Victoria-Idongesit Udondian

kó is pleased to participate at Art Basel Miami Beach with a dual-artist presentation featuring mixed media works on paper by Wura-Natasha Ogunji and ceramics by Victoria-Idongesit Udondian. This presentation is featured in Nova, Booth N14, the sector dedicated to contemporary artworks produced over the last three years. 

Wura-Natasha Ogunji

b. 1970, St. Louis, Missouri
Lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria 

Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a multidisciplinary artist who works across performance, video, painting, and drawing. Her practice explores the physicality and endurance of the body in relation to history, memory, and place. As a first-generation artist of the African diaspora who relocated to her father’s home country, Ogunji’s work examines concepts of homeland and the presence of women in public space. She engages the locality of Lagos, Nigeria as a site of contrasts and disjunctures, navigating the tensions between past and future, the built environment, and the natural landscape.

Ogunji’s mixed-media works on paper extend the physical and gestural language of her performances into a materially driven practice. Working with ink, hand-stitched thread, and collage on architectural tracing paper, she creates compositions that move between abstraction and figuration. Her process incorporates acts of tearing and reassembling the paper, introducing rupture and movement, while her background in performance informs the physicality and rhythm of her mark-making. Thread functions as both line and a structural element, introducing a tactile dimension to the paper's delicate surface. The transparency, ephemerality, and folds of the tracing paper lend a textile-like quality, suggesting curtains or veils.

Ogunji’s narratives draw inspiration from the daily rhythms, interactions, and spatial complexities that occur in the city of Lagos, operating as forms of psychological mapping across physical and imagined spaces. Water frequently emerges as a form of architecture: lagoons rendered in ink, stitched lines of a river, or the empty space of the paper itself --- an imagined expanse of sea. 

Wura-Natasha Ogunji received a BA from Stanford University in Anthropology in 1992 and an MFA from San Jose State University in Photography in 1998. Recent exhibitions include O Poder de Minhas Mãos, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo; A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, Tate Modern, London; rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; and The Power of My Hands: Afrique(s) artistes femmes, Museum of Modern Art, Paris. Ogunji was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has exhibited at Palais de Tokyo; Brooklyn Art Museum, Menil Collection, Seattle Art Museum, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. She has also participated at the Bienniale of Sydney, Stellenbosch Triennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennale , and the Lagos Biennial.

Ogunji was a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2012 and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Idea Fund. Her works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; North Dakota Museum of Art; The University of Texas at Austin; Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; and Kadist Foundation.

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian

b. 1982, Akwa Ibom, Nigeria

Lives and works in Buffalo, New York

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian works across textiles, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video, and ceramics. Her interdisciplinary practice is driven by an ongoing investigation into textiles and the ways material design shapes identity, drawing on the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday fabrics and objects. Trained in tailoring, painting, sculpture, and new genres, Udondian creates large-scale interdisciplinary projects with textiles at their core, often informed by her experiences growing up in Nigeria. Her work interrogates the postcolonial condition within an increasingly globalized world, examining the intersections of migration, labour, and global trade.

In After the Last Supper (2024-ongoing), Udondian interrogates Africa’s colonial history, evolving cultural identity, and its shifting relationship with China in a postcolonial context. Against the backdrop of China’s expanding investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in natural resources, Udondian asks: Is this a new form of colonialism? A modern “scramble for Africa”? Or could it signal a reorientation toward new alliances beyond former colonial powers? Referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Udondian employs its biblical connotations as a metaphor for the exploitation of African resources. The sculptures combine porcelain, shards, wood, Qinqua paints, and printed fabrics, developed during her residency at Jingdezhen International Studio in China, the porcelain capital of the world. During her residency, Udondian fabricated 3D printed porcelain and sourced found porcelain shards collected from Ghost Market, an early morning antique market in Jingdezhen, combining them to create hybrid forms.

Her research draws on historical objects taken from Africa during the colonial era, many now held in Western museums.  Studying collections at the British Museum, the National Museum in Lagos, and the Smithsonian, she incorporated AI-powered 3D scans of African artifacts and Chinese antiquities. This includes the bronze head sculptures from Ife, originally created in the twelfth and thirteenth century, and unearthed by British colonial administrators in Nigeria in 1938. The removal of the Ife heads in Nigeria at the time spurred the government to control the further export of antiquities in Nigeria. Udondian also models sculptures made from terracotta, produced by the Yoruba people in present day Nigeria during the twelfth-fifteenth century. 

The work also engages with the legacy of Chinese blue-and-white (Qinqhua) Ming dynasty ceramics, coating her sculptural busts with Ming-inspired colors and patterns and adding elements of antique porcelain fragments. The porcelain of the Ming dynasty, produced in China between 1368-1644 CE, elevated the decorative arts of the medium to new heights, and was in popular foreign demand. Ming dynasty porcelain was absorbed into Victorian and aristocratic aesthetics and now signifies more broadly the long history of globalization and complicated narrative of cultural consumption. These objects, which Udondian regards on one hand as signifiers of colonialism, form the starting point for her exploration of Sino-African relationships. Through the metaphor of global decorative arts, Udondian probes the entanglements of history, culture, and power. 

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian received her B.A. in Fine Arts (Painting) from the University of Uyo, Nigeria, in 2004, and her MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University, New York, in 2016. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York.

In 2026, Victoria-Idongesit Udondian participated in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Koyo Kouoh, taking place May 9-November 22, 2026. Udondian also participated in the Medina Triennial in Medina, New York, June 6 to September 7, 2026; and the FITE Textile Biennial in Clermont Ferrand, France, July 1, 2026 – January 10, 2027. 

Udondian was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2018. She has participated in numerous residencies, including Fountainhead (Miami), Instituto Sacatar (Bahia, Brazil), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown), Villa Strauli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Fondazione di Venezia (Italy), and Bag Factory Studios (Johannesburg). Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Fischer Landau Center for the Arts (New York), the Bronx Museum, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the National Museum (Lagos), the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester), the South London Gallery, and Villa Strauli Art Centre (Switzerland). Recent solo exhibitions include After the Last Supper at The Armory Show, New York (2025), Nsinam Mi Ke Ndi Owo at Buffalo Arts Studio, Buffalo, New York (2025), How Can I Be Nobody at Smack Mellon, New York (2022), and Adape 1 at The Arts Collaboratory, University of Buffalo (2021). Recent group exhibitions include the British Textile Biennial (Blackburn, UK, 2023), Fragmented World/Coherent Lives at Ten North Group Gallery (Miami, 2023), and Hacer Noche: Promised Land at Museo Textil de Oaxaca (Mexico, 2022). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (Nigeria), the West Collection (Philadelphia), and the Fondazione di Venezia (Italy).