Serge Alain Nitegeka's 'Personal Effects in Black' at Marianne Boesky Gallery explores black as formal and social force

Serge Alain Nitegeka's exhibition 'Personal Effects in Black' at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York ran from 11 January to 24 February 2018, featuring works from 2017. The Johannesburg-based artist, whose practice is informed by his refugee background from ethnic violence in Burundi and Rwanda, uses black to address themes like the Middle Passage. The show includes a corridor filled with overlapping black planks, creating an obstacle-course-like installation that visitors navigate. Sculptures titled Personal Effects II resemble attenuated exclamation marks, evoking hastily abandoned baggage on the floor. Paintings on bare plywood render similar forms in blues, blacks, and whites, establishing dynamic relationships between two- and three-dimensional space. Black functions as an accent in these geometric compositions, dividing or crossing colored planes to add diagrammatic energy, rather than predominating. In the press release, Nitegeka discusses the 'heaviness of the unknown,' linking black to a constant, poetic force. The exhibition's minimal sculptures and perceptual effects suggest personal effects are experiential and abstract, not object-based. Nitegeka's work references modernist precedents like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, with an architectonic quality enhanced by black lines recalling massed two-by-fours.