Wuh.ey - “Kuku na Misumari”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Kuku na Misumari”

A body, a mask, an animal. Nails pierce the skin, arranging themselves into a halo. A chicken's head grows from the human face—painful, majestic, incomprehensible. "Kuku na Misumari" —the chicken with nails—evokes the ambivalence of sacrifice: life and death, violence and renewal, flesh and spirit.

The chicken, both messenger and victim in many West African cultures, stands at the transition between worlds. It is sacrificed to mediate – between humanity and divinity, guilt and redemption. In Wuh.ey's work, this ritual transforms into a radical metaphor for the present: the body itself becomes a shrine, the nails a symbol of a torn spirituality in which faith and pain are inseparable.

The figure is reminiscent of the nkisi nkondi of Kongo tradition—those powerful sculptures into which nails were driven to seal oaths or summon spirits. Yet here, it is not an object that is depicted, but a living presence, a hybrid creature that gazes at us from the darkness. Humanity has become a vessel in which magic and modernity collide.

The work speaks of wounding as insight. Every nail is a memory, every piece of metal a line in the invisible web of relationships between body, history, and ritual. The transformation is brutal but necessary: ​​people must feel the pain to remember that sacrifice once meant communication—not destruction.

"Kuku na Misumari" is an icon of the in-between: not myth, not reality, but the embodiment of an ancient consciousness in the body of the digital. Wuh.ey depicts the moment when spirituality becomes visible again—not as religion, but as visual truth.