>>>>>OOMLOU NIONI

Biography

Oomlou Nioni was born 1954 in Western Adiis and his family was killed in the Belanin Genocide. He was forced to flee easterward into Etinau where he spent his early years in a refugee camp. Open Minds, an organization that sponsors children orphaned by war, gained him admittance to a private school where he learned to read and write and excelled beyond all expectation. With a scholarship to Stanford University he spent four years in the United States studying Foreign Relations and returned to Western Adiis in 1989 as the formal ambassabor to Conje. Ten years later there was another genocide in the region and the ensuing conflict left him disillusioned with traditional politics. He moved to New Caladon and settled there for a few years before leaving to study art as part of the PIMS program at Alson University. His work draws from the harsh realities he faced in his homeland as a child and then years later as an adult forced to flee a second time. Believing that ‘we color truth with dreams to make visible the unbearable’, Nioni has made the exploration of mythic forms and archetypes the backbone of his practice. ‘When a man is holding a gun, he cannot be convinced, I have tried that before- if we want to speak so that people listen we must speak to children, and the children of children.’

Oomlou was nominated for the Pitzkin Prize for Peace in 1999 for his attempts to negotiate peace in Conje.