Iké Udé: Artist, Photographer

With his ongoing photographic self-portraits, Sartorial Anarchy, dressed in varied costumes across geography and time, the work of Nigerian-born IKÉ UDÉ explores a world of dualities: photographer/performance artist, artist/spectator, African/post-nationalist, mainstream/marginal, individual/everyman and fashion/art. As a Nigerian born, New York based artist, conversant with the world of fashion and celebrity, Udé gives conceptual aspects of performance and representation a new vitality, melding his own theatrical selves and multiple personae with his art. Udé plays with the ambiguities of the marketplace and art world, particularly in his seminal art, culture, and fashion magazine, aRUDE and recently his style blog, theCHIC INDEX. Beyond Decorum (MIT Press, 2000), accompanied a traveling exhibition—organized by Mark Besire, then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art, in Portland, Maine—was the first comprehensive publication on Udé’s photography. The book contains photographs of the installations “Beyond Decorum,” “Uses of Evidence,” and “Project Rear;” several series, including Cover Girls, Uli, and Celluloid; and photographs from his magazine aRUDE. The book also includes essays by Kobena Mercer, Aimee Bessire, Valerie Steele, and Iké Udé himself, as well as an interview with the artist. The reader meets Udé the artist, editor, dandy, and aesthete. In his writing, Udé speaks of the futility of stereotypes, and in his photography, he brings to life the image of the artist in a plenitude of guises. Udé is the author of Style File: the World’s Most Elegantly Dressed, published by Harper Collins in 2008.