Wetin You Dey Do For Here
Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba
September 18, 2026 鈥� January 8, 2026
The Cabinet | Room 4390 鈥� 麻豆视频School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Wetin You Dey Do For Here explores diasporic experiences through found objects, repetition, replication, and speculative storytelling. The work began in 2023, when Tsegba, newly arrived in Vancouver, encountered a seemingly ordinary mask. The object appeared lonely and out of place, a condition that mirrored the artist鈥檚 own experience of displacement. Through a process of repeated casting, Tsegba began producing replicas of the mask, gradually assembling what appeared to be a community. The site-specific installation consists of seven white plaster sculptures, each emerging at different stages from a block of plaster of Paris and placed on narrow black pedestals of varying heights. Although produced from the same mould, each sculpture occupies a different state of becoming. They appear simultaneously to emerge and submerge, to be planted and to sprout. This cyclical movement evokes the experiences of queer immigrants and diasporic communities, for whom the search for home is often accompanied by continuous processes of loss, accumulation, and transformation.
The installation invites a slow practice of looking, as viewers encounter the mask in fragments before arriving at its complete form. Yet the movement between fragmentation and wholeness is not necessarily linear. The sculptures resist a singular reading of arrival or departure, suggesting instead that both conditions might coexist. Coupled with its titular question, which moves between the artist and the mask, between the replicas themselves, and between one immigrant and another, the installation becomes an encounter with questions of belonging, recognition, and displacement. Through repetition, the once solitary object acquires a collective presence, inviting speculative stories about the lives, journeys, and histories it might hold.
With this exhibition, The Cabinet takes on the appearance of a vitrine in an anthropological museum. The masks are brightly illuminated, presented frontally on gallery plinths, surrounded by glass and rich golden-brown walls, with a sandy floor. This mode of display recalls the histories of colonial collecting, extraction, and the displacement of African cultural objects into European and North American museums. Yet the mask at the centre of Tsegba鈥檚 installation is not necessarily an object of ritual significance. It may simply be a decorative souvenir, a tourist trinket, or an object whose origins and previous lives remain unknown. This uncertainty complicates the authority of the museum display and the expectations imposed upon objects perceived as quintessentially 鈥淎frican.鈥� The stark white replicas might evoke Frantz Fanon鈥檚 formulation of the white mask, or the histories of appropriation through which African aesthetic traditions were absorbed into Western modernism. At the same time, their repeated emergence suggests other possibilities: the formation of community through shared displacement, the persistence of memory through reproduction, and the ways in which objects, like people, acquire new meanings as they move between places.
Biography
A recent graduate of the SCA鈥檚 MFA program, Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist working across video, textile, sculpture, sound and digital collage. Guided by a philosophy of collage as a way of thinking, making and remembering, her practice explores African diasporic identity, cultural memory and material and digital forms of storytelling. Born and raised in Nigeria, and currently based between Abuja and Vancouver, Tsegba engages language, intimacy, spirituality and Afrofuturism to address suppressed histories and speculative futures.