Sokari Ekine: Spirit Desire
December 1, 2018 – January 31, 2019
Opening: Saturday Dec 8, 6-9pm
PhotoNOLA Reception: Saturday, Dec 15, 6-9pm
Spirit Desire is a series of photographic essays by Sokari Ekine that explore African Diasporic spiritual practices as spaces of resistance, imagination and sacred memories.
The series which includes images of everyday living, ritual and ceremony, shifts the gaze from representations that depict Vodoun as negative and presents a decolonizing narrative: one in which Vodouisants engage with a consciousness and spirituality that celebrates our humanity rather than focusing on a set of prescribed normative identities. Documenting in Haiti, Kenya and beyond, Ekine explores those in-between spaces, above and below, visible and invisible that constitute the many worlds that exist in harmony.
BIO
Sokari Ekine is a Queer Nigerian British Feminist, diasporic nomad, visual scholar and activist, writer, educator seeking out new possibilities and ways of being beyond the normative and hegemony of whiteness, heterosexuality and native informers. Ekine, originally from Nigeria and the UK, began her photographic journey in 2014 after a full career as an educator, writer and activist working in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean.
In 2018 Ekine published a wide selection of images from this long-term project in the book Spirit Desire: Resistance, Imagination and Sacred Memories in Haitian Vodoun .
Image titles:
Top – Sokari Ekine – Liquid
Lower – Sokari Ekine – Sodo Spiritual Bath
