00:00Thousands of clay elements that make up one piece of art.
00:04These are the creations of Ngozi Omeje Ezema in Munich's Pinakothek de Modena.
00:09The ceramic artist hails from Nigeria.
00:11Why do her vases look as if they had shattered to tiny bits in transport?
00:16This size of work, you would have imagined how frightening
00:21to ship them from Nigeria to this place if they are just one solid wall.
00:27When Ngozi Omeje Ezema first began working with ceramics,
00:31she did in fact turn out massive clay vessels.
00:34But they are limited by their sheer size, and so she felt limited in her creativity.
00:40I once fired, though I wasn't patient enough.
00:43I wanted to finish quickly so I didn't allow the work to dry properly.
00:48The body broke, so you see that kind of experience.
00:52She had that kind of experience more than once.
00:56But with the myriad of tiny terracotta elements, that can't happen.
01:01But unpacking and hanging them up does have its pitfalls too.
01:05It took the artist a week of working at dizzying heights
01:08to get her boundless vases into the proper shape.
01:11Boundless vases to me is a way of expanding the boundaries of ceramics and a way of breaking free as a woman.
01:23We possess enormous potentials that shouldn't be limited by what we are expected to do.
01:30We can climb to the highest.
01:32As a little girl, she modeled shapes in wet sand.
01:35There was no clay in her East Nigerian village.
01:38Her sister supported her ambition to study art.
01:41At the University of Nigeria in Ensuka, she finally got an opportunity to work with clay.
01:47Now she teaches there.
01:48In her studio close to campus, she sketches the designs and makes the individual clay leaves.
01:53The medium I'm using is a fire clay and it's high-temperature clay, less impurity.
02:02The leaves were rigid.
02:04This one with hand, it gives it different forms.
02:07They are never the same.
02:09It's painstaking work.
02:11It took a month for her to finish one big vase.
02:14As a mother of four children, she can't do it alone.
02:17She's hired helpers.
02:20Her kids also like to come to the studio and help out.
02:24What's left for the artist to do herself?
02:29And then the installation, I have to wait on my own.
02:36Ngozi Omeje Ezema's original technique has brought her success at biennales in Africa and East Asia.
02:43Her themes come from her own cultural background, but they're universal nonetheless.
02:48The elephant, for instance, turns up again and again.
02:52Her father was nicknamed Elephant.
02:55He died in 2013.
02:57She's still trying to come to terms with it.
03:00You know, the strings gives life to the elephant.
03:03The idea was to allow the audience to co-create with me by cutting down the strings.
03:09But if I allow others to cut this down and be able to bear it, then I'll be able to bear the passing of my father.
03:17Back to the vases.
03:18The Munich exhibition is her first in Germany.
03:21For the curator too, the solo presentation of an African artist is a first.
03:26Her approach is highly unusual.
03:33I don't have anything to compare it with.
03:36In a way, she's coming from the tradition of her country, this African approach.
03:41But still very different, completely modern.
03:48And that's why we see her at the vanguard of contemporary artists.
03:56Ngozi Omeje Ezema has made the big leap to Europe.
04:00A cause for celebration.
04:02Her art is also a plea to adopt a new contemporary view of Africa.
04:08Seeing this as an opportunity also to get to outer world, apart from Africa.
04:15It is also to create an awareness that African art is not necessarily just the pot.
04:23It's not just smaller pots or smaller vessels.
04:27It seems to predetermine what can only come from Africa.
04:32Her floating vases are a direct assault on the cliché of African ceramics.
04:37It recalls anything from beehives to swarms of leaves.
04:50But then I heard that it's clay.
04:53That's very impressive.
04:55I think it's sensational.
04:58It complements the space very nicely and I think it's great to see an African artist here.
05:02It's amazing.
05:04Just how the scale of the works comes across in this space.
05:08It's really a great new idea that we haven't seen before.
05:12Ngozi Omeje Ezema hasn't reached her own creative limits by any stretch.
05:18She's dreaming of a vase that fills an entire room.
05:22She may soon be able to make that dream a reality.
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