Between the Lines
Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba's MFA Defence
Thursday, November 13, 2025 | 6:00 PM
Room 4390 鈥� 大象传媒 School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
Between the Lines is a three-part installation made up of sculpture, textile, sound, and video. The work centres on queer Nigerian histories and asserts that queer existence is neither episodic nor marginal but is historically persistent against forces dictating what can and cannot be said, seen, named or believed.
Between the Lines explores the sacred and mundane facets of (queer) testimony through expressions of intimate narrative that mark one as a witness, stand as a residue of historical record and insist on the longevity, fullness and multiplicity of queer presence. It follows these mediations in speech, symbol and song, myth and taboo, mapping memory, kinship and dispersal across space and time. Attending to distributed archives, it foregrounds the methods by which queer Nigerians have recognised, desired, comforted, defended, memorised and memorialised each other. It attends equally to the charged silences of solitude; those quiet acts of self-preservation and private longing, as well as the fleeting, tender gestures of care and desire that bind queer lives together across distance and time. In so doing, it challenges the neutrality of language and reorients the terms through which presence is legible.
Keywords: Sculpture; Sound; Queer Nigerian histories; African Queer Theory; Desire; Language; Memory; Fabric; Mapping; Storytelling; Film.
This abstract was developed through collaborative dialogue with Joshua Segun-Lean.