Nanci Amaka: Cleanse / Floors
Media Room
On view October 11, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, October 11 from 3 – 5pm; remarks at 3:45pm
Catharine Clark Gallery will close its 2025 program with three solo exhibitions: Lenka Clayton's The Past (North Gallery), Katherine Vetne's Between Worlds (South Gallery), and Nanci Amaka's Cleanse / Floors (Media Room). Collectively, the exhibitions reflect on women's labor, the reimagining of domestic spaces, and memory as a creative force. All three will be on view from October 11, 2025, to January 3, 2026.
Nanci Amaka’s video work lives 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 of awareness; the psychological and philosophical nuances of visual language; oral indigenous histories; and ancestral knowledge inherited into our corporeal physiques.
Her series, Cleanse (2017–ongoing), was performed on August 2, 2017, at Ward Warehouse in Honolulu, HawaiĘ»i. It is the ritualistic cleaning, washing, and anointing of the 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.”
Amaka documented each section of the cleaning process at Ward Warehouse with the intent of later projecting it onto various spaces as a form of symbolically cleansing them of any past ill—a phantom baptism of sorts. As a series, Cleanse is about exerting agency in retrospect. It is the act of valiantly meeting imminent destruction with love and humility. Amaka’s three-channel video, Cleanse / Three Walls, was recently on view in Aloha NO: Hawai’i Triennial 2025. With this exhibit, Catharine Clark Gallery will have presented all three chapters of Amaka’s Cleanse series since May 2025.
Documentation of all three videos in the series will screened in conjunction with Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week (https://www.nexus-sfbay.com/) at TnT ART LAB on October 5 from 2 to 5 pm, Amaka’s work will be in the inaugural activation “Ritual and Resistance” (https://tnt-art-lab.vercel.app/artists/). This dynamic installation brings together six visionary women artists – Nanci Amaka, Mary WD Graham, Helina Metaferia, Trina Michelle Robinson, Lava Thomas, and Jasmine Narkita Wiley – whose practices span performance, video, installation, and participatory engagement. Through ritual, remembrance, and radical imagination, each artist offers a distinct lens on healing, resistance, and collective memory.
