Work by Amarachi Odimba, FSU Studio Art MFA Candidate, was selected as part of Making Contact: Haptic, Temporal, Spatial, and Conceptual Connections, the Department of Art History and Archaeology Fifth Biennial Graduate Student Symposium at Washington University in St. Louis.

Article courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis https://sites.wustl.edu/gsahs2024/exhibition/

Exhibition

Making Contact: Bodies and Borders

an exhibition without walls

Narratives of contact are embedded in a diverse range of human encounters, from the corporeal to the haptic, to the migratory and diasporic. This exhibition explores each of these modes of contact through the work of three individuals: visual artist Amarachi Odimba and dance artists Tess Angelica Losada Miner and Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón.

Odimba has reimagined her Visa Interview series, originally conceived as an inkjet print paired with a Ghana-Must-Go tote bag, in the portable form of a postcard for this exhibition. Personal questions typed in shades of red, white, and blue form a Madras plaid pattern in imitation of the Ghana-Must-Go bag’s recognizable design. The bag gained its name in 1983 following Nigeria’s expulsion of West African migrants, largely Ghanaian citizens, who had entered the country during a period of economic prosperity. More than forty years later, the bag remains a potent symbol of migration across the globe.1 Odimba’s slate of queries—Do you have a property? Why do you want to study? What do you do for a living?—draw upon the visa interview questions one might field when seeking entry to the United States. Though seemingly innocuous, these questions form a matrix of interrogation that highlights the imbalanced power dynamic between the governmental agencies and interviewees, further reinforcing the precarious positions of persons seeking entry. Odimba points to the history of Nigerian citizens’ immigration to the United States and her personal experience of this relocation as an impetus for her Visa Interview series, in which she questions the efficacy, practicality, and intentions of the United States’s visa interview questions. Through haptic engagement with the Visa Interview series postcard, Odimba’s work directly engages viewers in a meditation on the complex histories of migration and African diasporic experiences.