Subira Joy and Wandia Nduku are spoken word performers and identical queer brown twins.

Photo Credit: @reubenandjay

About the Residency

Subira and Wandia are in residence at ONCA gallery 11 – 19 January to develop their first joint show Joy Nduku, a show exploring gender, sexuality, blackness and the experience of being identical twins in a world governed by the push and pull politics of assimilation and individualism.

They will be working with a collection of artists and creatives from different disciplines during this residency to allow them to step beyond the boundaries of spoken word and further develop their practice.

About the Artists

Wandia Nduku is an uprooted poet from the UK living in Hamburg. They are an unapologetically Black Queer Migrant, tired of being misunderstood, mistreated and misplaced, striving to find power in voicing vulnerability and attempting to braid the strands of their identity together. Anger, pain and frustration meet love, hope and pleasure in Wandia’s work, as they explore their tangled experiences. A regular on the scene in the Black creative circuit in Hamburg, Wandia has been co-organiser and performer in Black History Month Hamburg’s poetry night, performed alongside Cumbia-Punk band Tunche Soundsystem, and appeared on Tide TV’s Afrika Outlook.

Subira Joy is a defiantly queer, unapologetically Black spoken word poet and activist. Their work weaves together the personal and political, experiences and imaginations, spoken with rage, softness, laughter, vulnerability and swearing. Witness patience at its end, queerness in its multitudes, and blackness at its fullness. Subira has created and performed two solo shows: Subira (performed at the Marlborough Theatre and won ONCA’s Green Curtain Award at 2018’s Brighton Fringe) and Coffee and Cream (performed at ONCA earlier this year).

Blog Image Credit: @kweerphotography