This week we’re highlighting Black Futurism with Ekow Nimako’s incredible and unusual sculptures made entirely of LEGO!
Nimako’s exhibition, ‘Building Black: Civilizations’ was exhibited at the Ago Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada from September 2019 – February 2020. The exhibition channelled Africa’s remarkable history and its powerful future in an Afrofuturist exhibition featuring a series of stunning sculptures built with over 100,000 black LEGO pieces.
Ekow Nimako is a contemporary Ghanaian-Canadian artist who started making LEGO sculptures in 2012 and his career took off in 2014 when he began using LEGO pieces exclusively in his practice after receiving a grant to exhibit his work in Canada during Black History Month.
"I started realising that not only did I enjoy making art with Lego, but it was important that I made Black art very specifically."
‘Civilizations’ is the latest chapter in Nimako’s dynamic ‘Building Black’ sculpture series. Using LEGO in truly astounding ways, Nimako’s work details small-scale pieces that expand on the history of Africa 1,000 years ago, forging a vision of the continent 1,000 years into the future through its history blended with the concepts, aesthetics, and visionary scope of Afrofuturism.
He considers himself to be a "futurist" who blends Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism and Afrofantasy focusing on the experience of those on the African continent, and on the African American experience of looking into the future. His content is deeply rooted in otherworldly Black narratives and draws on his fascination with architecture, futuristic cultures, and ancient civilizations.
"My wife always says, 'all movements of resistance are rooted in that imagination.' You have to imagine the freedom, the emancipation. You have to imagine this struggle being over. You have to project that in order to rise up, in order to resist. What else are you resisting for, if not for that Promised Land? Even art is a form of resistance and it's been used as a form of resistance for a very long time."
The artist hopes for an "inclusive future" that acknowledges the history of anti-Black racism and how "utterly disruptive" it is and recognises the role of Afrofuturism in allowing people to "envision a better world."