Nanci Amaka: Cleanse / Window
Media Room
On view July 26 – September 27, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, July 26 from 3 – 5pm; remarks at 3:45pm
Nanci Amaka’s video work exists in the space between looking, seeing, and knowing. Her performances explore the concept of being a spiritual being living in the present moment while laden with memories and future imaginaries. She is interested in the limitations around awareness; in the psychological and philosophical nuances of visual language; in oral indigenous histories; and in ancestral knowledge inherited into our corporeal physiques.
Her series, Cleanse (2017 – ongoing), was performed on August 2nd, 2017, at Ward Warehouse in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. It is the ritualistic cleaning, washing, and anointing of the aforementioned structure as a final act of nurture before its demolition. Amaka writes, “It is customary in many indigenous cultures—including my own Igbo culture—to wash and dress the body of the dead before they are buried. I lost my mother to violence as a young child. Sadly, her family did not get the chance to perform the final rites of washing her body before she was buried. Growing up, I was forbidden from speaking about her, and my father destroyed all photographs of her. Most times, it was as if she never existed. I subsequently dealt with the pain of losing her and the absolute silence around her by practicing forgetting.”
Cleanse was performed as an act of reparation for this lifelong sorrow at the advent of Amaka’s pregnancy. The promise of new life and a continued lineage necessitated engaging with the memory of her mother again. Amaka continues, “As I cleaned, I thought of my mother, begged her forgiveness for forgetting her, and prayed to negate intergenerational trauma for my future child. I consciously embodied physical calm while evoking and engaging with traumatic memories and simultaneously telling my child we were both safe—psychologically time-traveling between the painful past and hopeful future while physically engaged in a present act of nurture on a doomed structure. In the process, my body became drenched in sweat. It felt as if it were also cleansing itself from the inside out.”
Each section of the process of cleaning the space at Ward Warehouse was documented with the goal of it later being projected onto various spaces as a form of symbolically cleansing them of any past ill—a phantom baptism of sorts. Cleanse, as a series, is about exerting agency in retrospect. It is the act of valiantly meeting imminent destruction with love and humility. The first chapter in the series, the three-channel video Cleanse / Three Walls, was recently on view in Aloha NO: Hawai’i Triennial 2025 and subsequently presented in the gallery’s Media Room, in conversation with exhibitions by Arleene Correa Valencia and Alejandro Cartagena. Catharine Clark Gallery will present all three chapters of Amaka’s Cleanse series through the end of the year, with a new chapter screened with each exhibition rotation cycle.
