VIENNA.- Ndidi Dike is an internationally renowned British-Nigerian sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist born in London. Rare Earth Rare Justice is her first major solo exhibition at an Austrian institution. Dike works across mixed media, painting, sculpture, collage, photography, video, and installation. Her practice engages with the social, political, and economic conditions shaping the modern world, with a particular focus on the legacies of colonialism, postcolonialism, forced migration, and global capitalism.

At the centre of Rare Earth Rare Justice lies the ongoing exploitation of the African continent’s natural resources, and specifically the extraction of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dike traces how extractive industries fuel ecological devastation, climate change, displacement, and resource-driven conflicts, exposing how global demand for technology is met through systemic violence and dispossession.

The exhibition unfolds as a large-scale installation structured around absence, death, and mourning. Suspended from the ceiling, a monumental sculpture composed of approximately nine hundred autopsy neck rests forms a bullet-like shape facing a large circular mirror. The object evokes both the lethal economies of extraction and historical loading plans of slave ship plans, in which enslaved bodies were densely packed into cargo holds, pointing to the continuities of brutality against and commodification of Black bodies. Rather than depicting violence directly, the work activates memory and imagination, allowing associations to emerge in the minds of viewers. As the artist explains:

“The autopsy neck rests relate to police brutality […] to George Floyd, to the demonstrations in America, even as far back as to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, to the #EndSARS demonstrations in Nigeria in 2020, to Marielle Franco, a prominent Black human rights activist assassinated in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, to forty-three students abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014, reportedly with state involvement – the majority remain missing and are formally considered ‘disappeared’.”

Surrounding the central sculpture are artificial topographical landscapes in white, red, and blue: white stands for white hegemony, kaolin, and sand; red references the distinctive colour of soil in the artist’s south-eastern Nigerian homeland; and blue alludes to industrial and artisanal cobalt mining sites, where youths, women, and children work under inhumane conditions. The colours also invoke the national colours of Global North countries and China that are deeply implicated in global resource extraction. In this way, the installation points to political complicity: the involvement of multinational corporations with the collusion of African elites, state actors, politicians and international power structures.

A sound installation permeates the space with the relentless rhythm of money-counting machines. Stripped of any visual source, the mechanical noise becomes an omnipresent pulse – cold, repetitive, and inexorable. The sound evokes financial systems operating at a distance from the human and environmental costs they generate, transforming lives, land, and labour into abstract units of value. Its steady tempo mirrors the logic of extractive capitalism itself: accumulation without pause, calculation without accountability. Within the exhibition, the sound functions as an acoustic reminder that extraction is an economic process – sustained by invisible transactions, global markets, and financial infrastructures that render violence legible only as profit.

Furthermore, a wheelchair is positioned inside the installation, its seat and backrest meticulously braided out of spent bullet casings. It speaks of bodies rendered vulnerable, injured, or permanently impaired. The transformation of bullet casings into woven surfaces collapses distinctions between harm and care, protection and injury. At the same time, the wheelchair points to structural disablement: to countries, communities, and landscapes systematically depleted by extractive economies, left to bear long-term physical, social, cultural, and environmental damage.

Throughout the exhibition, materiality functions as a carrier of historical, economic, and political meaning. Objects bear traces of their former lives within systems of trade, violence, and labour, becoming entry points into the entangled histories of the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary neocolonial economies. Here, Dike’s practice deliberately creates friction between attraction and repulsion. Her Rare Earth Rare Justice asks a fundamental question: where is justice for the people whose land, labour, and lives are continuously extracted in the name of progress?

Ndidi Dike was born in London, UK, and lives in Lagos, NG.

Curated by Jeanette Pacher

Rare Earth Rare Justice was developed by Ndidi Dike in close collaboration with the Secession. Further adapted chapters will be presented at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, in 2026 and at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, in 2027. The new body of work was co-commissioned by the three partners.