BIOGRAPHY
Deinma Iyagba is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher, based in Canada, originally from Southern Nigeria. He makes work moving across and weaving together sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and sound. He explores the creation, intersections, and use of metaphors as modes for understanding across cultures, place, and time. Focusing his research on Nigeria, he investigates how these metaphors are intertwined with the shaping of relationships to identity, history, and ideas of the future.
He holds a BFA Honours from the University of Manitoba, where he also received the Tania (Tye) Asper Memorial Prize for Painting and the Cecil C. Richards Memorial Award for Sculpture. His works have been exhibited across Canada. In 2024 he opened the year with a solo exhibition at Ace Art Inc, Winnipeg, where he first introduced his body of work, To Create Context. The exhibition explored themes of syncretism, drawing parallels between the prevalence and appropriation of African textiles by fast fashion and his own sense of displacement. That same year, he exhibited alongside his cohort of graduands from around Canada at Art Mûr, in Montreal, a prestigious annual exhibition showcasing emerging artists from twelve Canadian universities. In 2025 he exhibited as part of a group exhibition un lento atardecer de verano, which explored devices for seeing, at PLATFORM centre in Winnipeg, and worked in collaboration with So Basically.ca and Ovalab and built A BOX, an 8x8x8-foot sculptural cube DJ booth created for the 2025 Nuit Blanche illuminate the night festival.