Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian Canadian artist who has made a name for herself in the Montreal scene. With pieces currently on display in the U.S., Nnebe regularly speaks on local art panels and conferences, sharing her vision with the Montreal community. In her spare time, she somehow also manages to pursue a degree in Economics and International Development Studies (IDS) at McGill. Her art explores the intersection of race, gender, and class, and in doing so exemplifies the intersection of self-expression and political resistance. Nnebe invited The Daily into her home/studio to talk about how she approaches these intersections through her multimedia project Coloured Conversations.

McGill Daily (MD): So, can you tell me what Coloured Conversations is?

Kosisochukwu Nnebe (KN): Coloured Conversations is something I started in July 2013. Initially, what it was supposed to be was a platform for collaborations that revolved around race and art. [But this year I] decided that what I wanted to do with Coloured Conversations was to kind of merge my love for visual arts practice with my love for critical race theory. I really wanted to combine theory with art. I wanted to focus on exhibitions, art projects, collaborations, but at the same time [still] participate in conferences, give workshops, and give presentations on the subject of race, gender, [and] class. I really wanted to bring all of that together.

MD: How did your experience as a Black woman at McGill shape your artistic endeavours, this journey that you're on right now?

KN: So in my first year of university, I was very excited. I knew exactly what I wanted my first year at McGill to be like - it was supposed to be like all my other friends' experiences. [...] But then, as soon as I got [to McGill] all I could feel was the whiteness and the privilege. From the get-go I felt excluded.

I tried extremely hard to kind of fit into that mould, and to be able to participate in the activities, things like going to a club and being able to pay for a cab. To anyone who's from that kind of background where your parents pay for everything, it's totally fine, but when you're paying for it, it's totally different. Or things like my friends constantly hooking up with all these different guys, and me not being able to find anyone who was interested in me - just all these [moments] piling up, and I wasn't quite sure how to deal with it. There was a lot of confusion. Then at some point I realized a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was a Black woman at McGill, and, because of that, my experiences would not be the same as my friends'.

Realizing that that was in part the reason why I wasn't [having] the experience I had expected caused me to really look into the issue of race. It pushed me toward artwork, actually, because the best way for me to really refocus on myself and really ask myself those questions was through art. So I started to find images of Black beauties, and I just felt like this impulse to draw them, to paint them.

[My McGill experience] was the catalyst, basically; it was that feeling of not being welcomed, and needing to create your own space, needing to represent yourself in a different way. Because I can't control how others can perceive me, but I can control how I perceive myself.

MD: Other people of colour are still feeling the exact same way. Do you feel that your art speaks to them on the same level? What has been the reception from the community?

KN: It's been a really great reception. In terms of my artwork, the inspiration is 100 per cent personal. I'm hoping that other people get inspired by it, but at the end of the day, whatever I create, I create out of a personal need. I'm speaking to myself, I'm speaking to five-year-old Kosi, I'm speaking to 11-year-old Kosi, I'm speaking to 15-year-old Kosi, and I'm going back and I'm seeing all of the things I wish I had seen, and I'm creating it myself. So it's an extremely personal journey, but at the same time I felt as if there was a lot that could be shared. If I'm talking about trying to inspire my younger self, then at the same time I can maybe try to inspire other people.

It has gotten a really good reception because in the same way that I was starved for that kind of representation, I feel as if a lot of other people are as well, and they've really responded well to it. [But] there are some things in terms of [that need for representation] that are kind of iffy. I remember I removed the description for [my first series] "Eze Nwanyi [Queen of Women]" because I knew it wasn't something I wanted to say anymore. Art should be what we use to critique. So I'm not gonna be here, promoting work that says that the African woman should be refined, queenly, because it says a lot about what she shouldn't be. It's conducive to an ostracization of other women.

MD: A lot of the time when we talk about race it's very negative. Your work is centred around the celebration of resistance, and the way you perceive, or want to perceive yourself. Why did you want to focus on celebrating that resistance?

KN: I'm going to draw this back to bell hooks. bell hooks says that Black love, or loving Blackness, is the most revolutionary tool that we have. I think that's extremely true because when we talk about Blackness there's this need to kind of centre the narrative on Blackness as pathology, as something to come to terms with, as something that's bad, like, 'yeah, we're working on it' - it's never something to be loved.

I remember reading some of bell hooks' work and stopping and being like, why do I love being Black? And I couldn't answer, because I never thought about it that way. Me and Blackness was always something I had to come to terms with. You're Black, deal with it. It's never loving. What is there to love?

Every time we're talking about Blackness as pathology we're fixating on whiteness, [and] if we're gonna talk about it in that way, then Blackness was something that was created by white people to validate themselves. They will always have a bottom and that bottom is Black. So if we can just shift that paradigm and talk about Blackness as something that is loved, that is beautiful, that we can learn from, then it can actually create something new. So more and more I'm trying to inspire myself from her words.

MD: So you're an economics major and an IDS major. Does what you're studying help with your artwork or do you find they're two separate things?

KN: To be honest, I am trying to find a way to merge them. IDS I hate, I really do fucking hate IDS. McGill ruined IDS for me [...] hearing so many white people talk about saving Africa will do that to you. But I do want to tie economics into my art. It's kind of hard right now because McGill does have a way of ruining everything for me, so it has also ruined economics for me, because it's very right-leaning. But at the end of the day I know that economics is extremely important, and to be able to visualize some of the issues is something I would want to do [...] but I need an educational backing that I don't know if I'll be able to find in Canada.

MD: Why do you think not Canada?

KN: Canada doesn't have an open conversation about race. It really doesn't. And it sucks for me to be like, 'Yeah, I'm not gonna stay here and actually contribute to the community in a field,' but I want to go to the [U.S.]. So I would want to go to the [U.S.], but in terms of studying it's extremely expensive.

MD: So what's this next piece that you're working on?

KN: It's technically for Black History Month but it's taking place in April. It's a group exhibit, there are about eight artists in all, and we were given the theme of Oliver Jones. Oliver Jones is a jazz pianist, he grew up in Montreal in Little Burgundy, and he's very celebrated - a little less famous than Oscar Peterson.

So I did my research, I found out that he made a trip to Nigeria that was filmed by the National Film Board that I [could] rent and watch. At the same time, I was also reading some of Stuart Hall's work on the diaspora, and on culture as something that's becoming and never fixed. He talks about la présence Africaine, and Africa as something that we can never quite go back to. It's kind of like it's constantly changing; we bring a part of it back with us and we recreate it wherever we are.

When [Jones] was in Nigeria you can see this sense of familiarity; the chiefs of the village welcome him and he says 'thank you, I'm glad to be back.' It's just that idea of going back to your roots. There's this one point where you see something called the talking drums - these small drums with two faces. You can speak with it, and when the slaves were taken from West Africa to wherever they were, to the Caribbean for example, they recreated it using materials that they found. They used it as a form of resistance. Because in the same way that you can communicate between villages you can communicate between plantations, [and so] it was banned.

So what I'm doing is creating a miniature piano, and the legs are going to be the talking drums, and the rest is just going to be wood, and then the interior is going to be the painting. It's going to be titled The Bone Memory of Oliver Jones, and it's really just going back to that experience of him in Nigeria. It will say that you may have been there only for that time period, but this has always informed your music - it has been with you from the very get-go and it is always going to be the basis of your work.

MD: So what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned from your journey?

KN: That is a good question. One lesson was that I'm enough, and that has to go back again to the reason why I started - [being] in a place of not feeling sure if I was enough, and feeling excluded, feeling like a lot of bad emotions. Really understanding that I'm enough - I needed that and that's a much more personal thing. Another lesson was always be critical. A third lesson would be always challenge yourself. If you're not doubting yourself, you're not doing it right either.

- This interview has been edited for length and clarity.