Chukwudi Nwachukwu
The Right to Rest
Artist Room Residency · 22 September–22 October 2026
Port Harcourt & Nsukka, Nigeria
Photography · Research · Visual Development
The Right to Rest was developed during Chukwudi Nwachukwu’s four-week Artist Room Residency with CISTA ARTS.
About the Project
The Right to Rest is an ongoing photography series exploring the spaces and overlooked moments between work, waiting and recovery. Photographed across Port Harcourt and Nsukka, Nigeria, the series moves beyond depictions of people resting to look at empty spaces, landscapes and traces of human activity.
This project continues the conversation around labour that shaped my earlier work in 2026, while shifting attention towards what happens when work pauses or stops.
I made the photographs with a digital camera, working mainly with available natural light. The images move between neutral and warmer sepia tones. Rather than using colour to represent rest directly, I have used these shifts in tone to support different moods of stillness, waiting and inactivity across the series.
— Chukwudi Nwachukwu
During Artist Room
Chukwudi began The Right to Rest with a series of conversations and photographic experiments exploring how people understand and experience rest in relation to work, responsibility and economic pressure.
As the residency developed, the enquiry moved beyond portraiture and direct representations of people resting. Interviews raised questions about the distinction between physically stopping work and being able to disengage from it mentally, while photographic experimentation brought increasing attention to environments, objects, empty spaces and traces of human activity.
Working across Port Harcourt and Nsukka allowed the project to expand further through different landscapes and everyday environments. Through weekly written curatorial exchanges and a live curatorial discussion, the residency focused on the project’s conceptual direction, photographic language, editing, sequencing and the relationship between colour, space and human presence.
The resulting photographs form the first developed stage of an ongoing project rather than a completed series.
Curatorial Note
The Right to Rest developed considerably during the four-week residency. What began as an enquiry centred largely on interviews and portraits gradually opened towards a more complex consideration of rest as a physical, psychological and spatial condition.
One of the most productive shifts was Chukwudi’s increasing attention to what remains when visible activity stops: an empty room, a place of waiting, a landscape, an object or a trace of labour. These photographs do not necessarily identify whether we are witnessing rest, pause, absence or interruption, and it is precisely this uncertainty that gives the project room to develop.
The residency has established a strong starting point for a longer photographic enquiry. Rather than resolving the question of what it means to rest, the work leaves that question productively open.
Dr Fatemeh Takhtkeshian
Curatorial Mentor, Artist Room
Artist Reflection
At the end of the residency, Chukwudi reflected on the development of The Right to Rest, the changes in his photographic approach and the questions he intends to continue exploring beyond Artist Room.
About the Artist
Chukwudi Nwachukwu is a Nigerian fine art photographer based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His practice explores people, labour, environment and everyday experience within contemporary African life.
Working through portraiture, constructed imagery and observational photography, he is interested in how social, economic and environmental conditions shape individual experience and identity.
His photographic projects include Soft Bodies, Hard World, The Hills That Raised Us, The Labour of Rivers and No Rest for Us: The Grindster. His work has been exhibited in Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States, including at the Griffin Museum of Photography. In 2026, he presented Labour, his first solo photography exhibition, at Delaroke Art Gallery in Port Harcourt.
Website: chukwudinwachukwu.com
Instagram: chocwrld
Continuing the Project
The Right to Rest remains an ongoing photographic project.
Following Artist Room, Chukwudi intends to continue developing the series through further photography and research across different environments and experiences. Future possibilities include exhibition, publication and collaborations that extend the conversation around rest, labour and human wellbeing.
The artist is also interested in exploring how the project might develop a longer-term relationship between photographic practice and academic research.
From the Artist Room Journal
Inside Artist Room: Chukwudi Nwachukwu on The Right to Rest
In an end-of-residency conversation, Chukwudi reflects on the origins of the project, the role of interviews and fieldwork, the shift towards photographing spaces and traces of activity, and how the residency changed his understanding of rest.