NIDIDI DIKE Rare Earth Rare Justice

Rare Earth Rare Justice, Ndidi Dike’s first major solo exhibition at an Austrian institution, presents the British-Nigerian artist’s multidisciplinary practice across sculpture, installation, painting, collage, photography, and video. Born in London, Dike examines the social, political, and economic forces shaping the contemporary world, with a focus on colonial legacies, forced migration, and global capitalism. At the core of the exhibition lies the ongoing extraction of natural resources from the African continent—particularly cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—revealing how global technological demand is sustained through ecological destruction, displacement, and systemic violence.

The exhibition unfolds as an immersive installation structured around absence, mourning, and the afterlives of violence. A monumental suspended form made of around nine hundred autopsy neck rests confronts a circular mirror, evoking both extractive economies and the spatial logic of slave ships, where Black bodies were reduced to cargo. Without depicting violence directly, the work activates memory and association, connecting histories of enslavement to contemporary instances of state brutality and disappearance. Surrounding landscapes in white, red, and blue reference raw materials, geographies, and global power structures, pointing to the complicity of multinational corporations, political actors, and international systems in ongoing extraction. A sound installation of incessant money-counting machines fills the space, translating these processes into an abstract, relentless rhythm of accumulation detached from human and environmental cost.

Throughout the installation, objects carry layered meanings shaped by histories of labour, trade, and violence. A wheelchair constructed from woven bullet casings evokes bodily vulnerability while collapsing distinctions between harm and care, and points to the long-term damage inflicted on communities and environments. Across the exhibition, Dike stages a tension between attraction and repulsion, using material and form to expose the entanglement of past and present extractive regimes. In doing so, Rare Earth Rare Justice confronts viewers with a pressing question: how can justice be imagined for those whose land, labour, and lives continue to be exploited in the name of progress?