by usia review

Founded by Gustav Klimt in 1897 and his contemporaries in rebellion against the conservative art establishment, the Secession remains one of the oldest independent exhibition spaces devoted to contemporary art. Conceived as a site of Gesamtkunstwerk—the Wagnerian ideal of “total art,” in which architecture, design, and artistic experience merge—the building continues to function as a space for confronting the political and cultural tensions of its time.

It is within this “white cube” that British-Nigerian artist Ndidi Dike presents her first major solo exhibition in an Austrian institution. Curated by Jeanette Pacher, a long-standing member of the Secession’s curatorial team, Rare Earth Rare Justice emerged from a year-long collaboration and a “Dialogue Residency” in Vienna.

Born in London and based in Lagos, Dike’s artistic practice combines sculpture, installation, archival material, and found objects to examine the lasting consequences of colonialism, trade, and resource extraction. Her work frequently explores how ordinary materials—whether industrial waste, discarded consumer goods, or historical commodities—carry the hidden histories of exploitation embedded within global economic systems. Rather than treating objects as neutral artifacts, Dike approaches them as evidence of unequal exchanges between nations, bodies, and environments.

Past and Present: A Living Trauma

At the center of the exhibition, we immediately encounter an enormous bullet-shaped installation composed of approximately 900 autopsy neck rests. The installation is arranged in the form of a transatlantic slave ship, recalling the infamous Brookes slave ship. It evokes the historical commodification of Black bodies and draws a direct connection between past and contemporary systems of policing, surveillance, and disappearance. Trauma is presented not as a closed historical event, but as an enduring and unresolved condition — a taboo subject in many Western societies and former empires.

As mentioned previously, the work recalls the notorious diagram of the Brookes slave ship published in 1788 by British abolitionists before the advent of photography. Intended to expose the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade, the diagram depicted how 454 enslaved Africans were packed into the ship’s decks with ruthless efficiency. Yet the image itself carried a disturbing logic: human beings were rendered not as individuals, but as interchangeable units of cargo. Reduced to identical black silhouettes arranged within a rigid geometric grid, they became visual evidence of a system that transformed people into commodities.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic under this logic of extraction and exchange. In Dike’s work, this history is not treated as a distant memory; rather, it continues into the present. Within the Nigerian context, these inherited scars remain painfully active. By linking the autopsy neck supports to events such as the #EndSARS protests, Dike suggests that the Black body continues to function as a site of control, disposability, and political violence. The “abstract unit of value” once imposed upon enslaved people, the work argues, persists today through systemic neglect, state brutality, and institutional erasure.

Dike’s installation also enters into dialogue with a broader lineage of artists who have critically revisited the imagery and legacy of the Brookes slave ship. These include Romuald Hazoumè’s La Bouche du Roi (1997–2000), Elgin Cleckley’s Brookes (Revisited) (2020), Radcliffe Bailey’s Western Currents series, J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship, and Betye Saar’s Gliding into Midnight (2019). Like these works, the Bullet installation reactivates the visual language of the slave ship in order to confront the enduring structures of racial violence and historical erasure.

As the artist explains:

“The autopsy neck braces refer to police brutality […], to George Floyd, to the demonstrations in America dating back to the Los Angeles riots in 1992, to the #EndSARS demonstrations in Nigeria in 2020, to the prominent Black human rights activist Marielle Franco, who was murdered in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, to the 43 students whose abduction in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014 allegedly involved government officials — the majority of whom remain missing and are officially considered ‘disappeared’.”

The Human Cost of the Green Transition 

The dialogue between the Bullet installation and the artificial topographical landscapes functions as a living testimony to forms of dispossession that continue to structure modern societies. Dike exposes the invisible human cost of technological progress and global consumption. The cobalt used in batteries, the violence that secures its extraction, and the displacement of vulnerable communities all recall the architecture of the slave ship itself.

This exhibition interrogates the moral contradictions underpinning the “green” ambitions of the Global North and China. Through vivid cobalt-blue sand and a wheelchair intricately woven from spent bullet casings, Dike exposes the violence embedded within the extraction of the rare minerals that power smartphones, electric vehicles, and rechargeable batteries.

In 2026, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that China controlled roughly 70 percent of the global market share for strategic mineral refining. While cobalt is extracted primarily in Africa, the significant increase in value occurs elsewhere: cobalt valued at approximately $5.80 per kilogram at the mine can exceed $16 per kilogram once refined in China. Dike’s work foregrounds this unequal geography of profit, revealing how resource-rich African nations remain trapped within systems that export raw materials while external powers accumulate wealth through processing and technological production — in other words, through contemporary forms of colonialism.

Communities near the Tenke Fungurume mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have reported severe respiratory illnesses, persistent nosebleeds, and pregnancy complications associated with sulfur dioxide emissions from nearby processing plants. Despite these complaints and documented harms, many mining operations continue to receive “green” ESG certifications, which critics increasingly describe as forms of institutional greenwashing that obscure systemic environmental destruction and human rights abuses.

At the same time, the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has recently attempted to reclaim greater control over its “geological inheritance.” Dike situates these struggles within a broader critique of extractive capitalism, in which ecological devastation and bodily harm are routinely justified in the name of technological progress and sustainability.

Geographically and psychologically distant from cobalt mining sites, the installation produces a shocking confrontation. The seductive beauty of the cobalt-blue sand is interrupted by the relentless sound of money-counting machines, whose mechanical rhythm evokes the cold logic of global finance and extraction. Through this sensory tension, Dike reveals the intimate relationship between multinational profit, political corruption, ecological destruction, and human suffering. The wheelchair becomes a powerful symbol of the severity of the current situation and the urgent need for action by global leaders.

Within Nigeria, Dike’s work also functions as a form of civic intervention — a visual “State of the Nation” address that confronts systems prioritizing profit over human life. Rather than offering moral resolution or easy optimism, her practice insists on exposing the deep entanglement of ecology, violence, labor, and economic dependency.

Future projects are expected to expand her engagement with electronic waste, colonial commodities, and the geopolitics of extraction. With subsequent chapters of Rare Earth Rare Justice planned for Stockholm in 2026 and Warsaw in 2027, the exhibition increasingly positions itself as a living archive of cyclical exploitation, resistance, and historical memory.

More than a documentary account of injustice, Rare Earth Rare Justice transforms the exhibition space into a site of ethical confrontation. In doing so, Dike demonstrates how contemporary art can continue to function simultaneously as historical witness, political critique, and a powerful provocation to collective conscience.

#NdidiDike #SECESSION 

A Secession Production

Thanks to: Ramona Heinlein, Secession