Everlyn Nicodemus
Whether it is through painting, collage, academic writing, curating, or poetry, Everlyn Nicodemus’ (b. 1954, TZ) work is rooted in a longstanding engagement towards art as a site for healing, forging counter-discourse, and exercising freedom.
Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York. Copyright The Artist.
Her life journey brought her from Tanzania to Sweden, France, Belgium and the UK where she has been living for the past fifteen years. Nicodemus spent the 1990s and early 2000s living in Antwerp and Brussels, where her work on the postcolonial condition was very influential and significant in raising awareness about racism in Europe, as well as the need for research and writing on the history of Modern African Art. Throughout her career, Nicodemus nurtured a distinctive and polymorphous practice anchored in postcolonial theory, feminism and trauma studies.
This retrospective exhibition in WIELS delves into the breadth of a practice that always refused conformity and the “othering” frames of expectation shaped by the Western ethnographic gaze. Instead, Nicodemus approaches colour, texture and the form of the human body through a profound involvement with community organizing, communion and relationality.
Curator: Sofia Dati
BIO
Everlyn Nicodemus (b. 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) lives and works in Edinburgh. She is the recipient of the 2022 Freelands Foundation Award for her retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, from October 2024 to May 2025. Her work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou’s Paris Noir (2025); Bozar’s LOVE IS LOUDER (2024); Hacking Habitat: Art of Control, Utrecht, Holland (2016); 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012), curated by Catherine de Zegher; Bystander on Probation, The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, UK (2007); Crossing the Void, Cultural Center Strombeek, Brussels, Belgium (2004); Displacements, University of Alicante, Spain (1997); Vessels of Silence, Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium (1992); and the solo exhibition Everlyn Nicodemus, National Museum, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (1980).
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland.