The first museum exhibition of David Uzochukwu’s career is not opening in Berlin, London, or New York. It is opening in Memphis, and that matters.
David Uzochukwu: Bodies of Water runs June 10 through September 27, 2026, at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, marking the debut solo museum show for the Austrian-Nigerian photographer and filmmaker. At just 27, Uzochukwu has already been published in the British Journal of Photography, i-D, and Dazed, exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London and Fotografiska in New York and Shanghai, directed episodes of Black Fruit that premiered at Tribeca, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Now the Bluff City gets him first.
Hybrid Beings, Dreamlike Waters
Bodies of Water gathers 22 photographs of figures who are part human, part animal. Adorned with fins, scales, and other features, they move through surreal landscapes built to test them, and they are equipped to survive. The images draw on mythology, fantasy, and histories of migration to evoke the adaptability and resilience of diasporic communities navigating environments often marked by hostility and exclusion. Within these imagined worlds, Blackness resists simple definition. It is fluid, shifting, and vibrantly alive.
A Memphis Connection Behind the Lens
The exhibition is curated by Efe Igor Coleman, an independent curator and Yale-trained historian who previously served as the Blackmon Perry Assistant Curator of African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the Brooks. Her return to the museum for this show puts Memphis at the center of a global conversation about identity and belonging.
