Deploying the visual language of minimalism and geometric abstraction, Serge Alain Nitegeka reappropriates modernism’s formal preoccupations with color, line, and space to examine the lingering effects—both personal and political—of forced migration. Drawing on his own history as a refugee, Nitegeka erects—at times quite literally—barriers, obstacles, and borders both visual and physical for the viewer to traverse. Conjuring unsettling abstracted, obstruction-laden landscapes—in both two dimensions and three—Nitegeka evokes the psychological experience of political displacement and statelessness.
Nitegeka’s work was the subject of a 2015 solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland’ Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Nitegeka’s work was included in the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and at the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden the same year. In 2019, Nitegeka received the Grant-Award from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, New York, NY and the Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture from the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa in 2018. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Newark Museum, NJ; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, among others. The artist lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.