Serge Alain Nitegeka
Appearing as renderings of his immersive installations, Nitegeka’s painted abstractions are an exercise in precision, a way of re-establishing the control taken from him, of exchanging precarity for certainty. As in Colour & form LXII, his palette is reduced to only a few colours, the paint applied in flat planes of blue, yellow, white and black. To black, the artist assigns particular import. “We talk about the nothingness of it, the emptiness,” he says. “But in that absence there is always the possibility of something. On the canvas, I like its bruteness, how graphic and delineating it can be.” Nitegeka’s canvas, however, is not cloth but wood – pine panels repurposed from packing crates.
b.1983, Rwanda
In image and installation, Serge Alain Nitegeka explores such complex themes as forced migration and displacement with distilled formalism. There is to his work a geometric minimalism, his forms clear-cut and clean-lined. His conceptual and formal preoccupations consider how bodies negotiate space, how transit and mobility, barriers and bureaucracy choreograph the refugee’s movement. A refugee himself, Nitegeka is no stranger to the physical and emotional terrain traversed by so many African asylum seekers. The artist’s sculpted environments – large-scale obstacles made of wood – engage the viewer in a symbolic and somatic experience. “I want the viewer to physically experience what it feels like to be forced to move in a particular way,” he says, “but I don’t want it to be restrictive; I see these installations as collaborations between me and the viewer. We’re all part of a story of forced migration, really. History is a narrative of human movement.” Among Nitegeka's more transitory works is 100 Stools (2011), where the artist distributed handmade pine stools to foreign nationals gathered outside a Refugee Reception Centre in central Pretoria, South Africa. It was a small yet poignant gesture, an attempt, as Nitegeka says, “at giving significance to the asylum seekers, to humanise them, to give them a bit of dignity.”