JUXTAPOZ Magazine – New Toyin Ojih Odutola graphics and works on paper in “Ilé Oriaku”

Jack Shinman Gallery I am pleased to present Ilé OriakuExhibition of multimedia graphics and works on paper by the past Juxtapoz Cover artist, Toyen Odotola, the seventh individual show of the artist with the exhibition. Based on its inclusion in the Nigerian wing in the Venice Biennial and its individual exhibition in Kunsthalle Basel, in 2024, these works present these crosses that explore together the uses and restrictions of the language – including its beauty in failure and success together – as a tool to create personal meaning and collective history.

The central location, which is revealed by each of these works in a fictitious Mubari house, is a sacred area rooted in the traditions of the Nigerian Eye Eye, where the members of society can be celebrated and where the gods can be honored, those who protect society from the supernatural works of nature in the tragedy and shouting. These structures are traditionally designed of raw materials such as clay, wood and straw, and are usually adorned with shapes, sculptures, engineering patterns and murals that depict spiritual or legendary topics. Mubaari’s house, which was invented by Odotola, praises her late grandmother and her uncle, who belongs to the Ighibo and Ethnic Groups, respectively: “Ilé” means “the house”, “building” or “the house” in Europa, while “Oriaku” is the name of Ebu her grandmother. It was called the departed family members, and this house works as an exciting stage for Ojih Odutola characters where they seem to be arrested between situations or before or after exchange as well, while providing space of spiritual and cultural communication with its ancestors.

Although the MBARI house provides a specific cultural architectural reference, the actual spaces created by Ojih Odutola are often fragmented, unclear and boycott, so that its numbers are depicted without obstacles. In a similar context, its citizens block their faces with hands or pieces of clothes, or appear with their appearance or profile. While Ojih Odutola constantly makes what it described as “spiritual performance artists” in cases of lack of determination and transition – on the threshold of communication or in its direct heels – they also visualize the movement and flared up between physical situations. It is used regularly titles that call the theater and its areas of dramatic production, which means a narrative relationship between works while creating contradictions between what the titles describe and what the drawings appear. Despite the transformations in its perspective that occurs about these numbers, they are still saturated with a great psychological presence and privacy, because Ojih Odutola allows them to read pictures like spiritual zeros. They put us at the present time with a link to the past.

The complex tone that is sensitive to OJIH ODUTOLA all over the exhibition leads to a large part of the appetite of its materials and accuracy that you use. For these works, a variety of materials including charcoal, chalk, stained pencil, graphite and pastel were used on pillars ranging from paper, linen, dura-Lar. Every action, whether it is intimate or huge, is presented in a luminous color often sparkling across the broken and tested architectural spaces. The gem-like quality of its color palette is rooted in the tradition of mbari, where the geographical source of the dye contributes to its symbolic meaning-for example, yellow, which symbolizes vitality, obtained from a sacred location along the Emo River in Nigeria, while the green, which represents the renewal, comes from the same Clay of the river. Although it carries with them specific records of meaning historically, the colors that Ojih Odutola uses are of the same importance as their emotional and class power, or for the way the worlds of their characters have to our characters.

These drawings express Ojih Odutola for the ways in which the language can work, whether oral or physical, as a barrier to communication as much as it can facilitate it. Personal and cultural contexts remain decisive for her, specifically with regard to her experience and family in existence between languages ​​and customs in the original Nigeria and that West on a broader scale. These numbers and scenes that live within them are defined by their leadership of family and community communication, regardless of any obstacle. By doing this, they point out that it is still possible to create new languages.

Commitment to the exhibition will be the launch Ilè oriakuA new study documenting OJIH ODUTOLA’s double shows in Kunsthalle Basel and Nigerian wing during Venice Biennial 2024. It was designed by Pacific Books and participated in its publication with Kunsthalle Basel, Ilè oriaku A closer look at the detailed and detailed detailed work provides richly, which picks up the nuances of their characters with exceptional accuracy, while examining their Nigerian heritage directly. Similar to the exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, the postponement of the post raises an imaginary Mubari house as a network, taken from the walls of the exhibition, stripped on the printed page to create a conceptual communication for work and writing within it. The scientific texts written by Muhammad Al-Misili, Olamego Vagimisin, Arin Ginoa Gilbert are accompanied by creative contributions from Neline Ogier Odotola, Towen Odotola, Josephine Auriao Oge and Lennett Yiyadum-Bouki.