Doyle Wham Gallery presents LOOTY · First solo exhibition

Notice of Reclamation

A comprehensive look at Chidi Nwaubani’s recent practice — from the Cape Town Art Fair and the Venice Biennale to The Rosetta Code — anchored by Mbari Memorial, an installation where touch is required and your bodies close the circuit.

Dates: 12–25 October 2026 · Frieze Art Week
Location: art’otel London Hoxton, EC2A 3DT
Method: Digital reclamation
Entry: Free · RSVP for opening-week events

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Mbari Memorial

Drawing from the Nigerian Igbo tradition of Mbari houses — sacred architectures built collectively as offerings to the earth goddess Ala, historically eradicated under British colonial rule — the installation approaches the practice not as a lost artefact to preserve, but as a methodology of community-making to continue today.

Interactive ogene sculptures, cast in bronze and presented on informal-market bottle crates, act as conductive interfaces. When participants make contact with the artwork and one another, they complete an electrical circuit that generates a unique digital sculpture — downloadable, with no usage restrictions. Restitution reframed as collective, imaginative labour.

What cannot be returned intact must be collectively rethought.

If a Tree Falls…

A digital collage series that deconstructs early 20th-century ethnographic photographs of Mbari houses. By erasing the human figures and introducing recurring Uli motifs, the works highlight the absence of cultural continuity in the colonial archive.

Also showing

Award-winning work from the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (Tomorrows/Today Prize, 2026), pieces exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and material from the ABC documentary Stuff the British Stole: The Rosetta Code.

Rooted in critical museology, African epistemologies and digital practice, the exhibition interrogates the extraction and archiving of African cultural heritage — and proposes a shift from object-centred preservation toward collective, living forms of cultural recovery.

Opening week programme

Mon 12 OctOpening nightArrivals & welcome · Film screening · Drinks reception18:00 · 18:30 · 19:30
Thu 15 OctEveningPanel discussionTimes to follow
Sat 17 OctDaytimeLOOTY interactive workshopLimited places · RSVP

Visit

art’otel London Hoxton
Hoxton, London EC2A 3DT
Open through the run, 12–25 October 2026.

Press, institutional and collector enquiries: hello@doylewham.com