Catalogue > At random

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s I prayed to the wrong god for you. combines video and sculptural elements in a highly personal ritual dedicated to Shango, a deity or Orisha within the Afro-Cuban religion Santería/Lucumí whose origins can be traced to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. In this project McClodden merges her spiritual requirements as a priestess of Ogun and artistic work to repair a period of personal exhaustion and to confront the relationship between Christianity and colonialism that was imposed on the artist’s ancestors: enslaved Africans, Black southerners. To begin this project McClodden cut down a cedar fir tree (a hybrid wood, distinct from the pure cedar traditionally associated with Shango) and carved six tools from cedar fir. Traveling with these objects across the United States, Cuba, and Nigeria, the artist engaged in ritual with Shango, employing the helmet on view here as a ceremonial witness. The videos, which chart the labor and time of this undertaking, offer an account of diasporic devotion and the significance of objects as storytellers.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden [she/her] is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work often employs a citational practice exploring and critiquing issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. Her interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. McClodden has exhibited and screened work at the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Whitney Museum; MOCA LA; MCA Chicago; MoMA PS1; among others. She has recently been awarded the 2019 Bucksbaum Award - McClodden was chosen from among the seventy-five artists whose works were presented in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. McClodden has been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, the 2018–19 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, among other awards. McClodden curated the traveling exhibitions A Recollection. + Predicated. featured within Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental, and more recently There Are No Shadows Here: The Perfect Moment at 30. She lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA.