With his installation, Blood Type, artist Dozie Kanu inaugurates Performance Space’s Open Room, a publicly accessible space for community. The room is softened and soaked in dark tones. A work table snakes down the wall, onto the floor, across the room, back onto the floor, across the room. An array of stools are lined up, free to be taken and used.
 
In his sculptural work Kanu often teases and disrupts functionality by juxtaposing the utterly familiar and domestic with jarring culturally evocative materials. In the case of Blood Type the banal discomfort of a present day coworking space is undercut with anachronistic shapes from Portugal, Nigeria, and America that trace a darker entangled past. The artist—born in Houston, TX to Nigerian immigrant parents, and currently residing in a warehouse he converted in rural Portugal—offers up history and autobiography as a gathering space: to be filled with performances, visitors, and community members each bringing multitudes of interpretation to its charged surfaces.
 
On October 19 Kanu will present a performance program in his installation as part of Performance Space’s Octopus series.