Oluseye Ogunlesi is a Nigerian-Canadian artist who examines Blackness through sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. His travels have taken him on an Afro-diasporic journey through Africa, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Plantations, beaches, and other sites related to the migratory journeys of Black people\u200a\u2014\u200aforced or otherwise\u200a\u2014\u200aare where he has collected or documented the location of objects that he reimagines as talismans left behind. BLACK EXODUS: WINTER ARRIVAL <\/em>told how the movement of Black people, forced or intentional, is a story of resistance and adaptation in the face of the unknown. A popular phrase among diasporic people is \u201cour ancestors\u2019 wildest dreams\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa description for achievements of a people with a lineage that includes enslavement and colonization. African spiritualism lives within this phrase, and the more mystical elements of that spirituality were represented throughout the exhibition.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Earth-toned walls offered a subtle background that worked in collaboration with the onyx materials that Ogunlesi uses. Found objects lined the walls as part of his ongoing Eminado <\/em>series(2018\u2013ongoing). It was easy to imagine the sand-coloured floors as the beaches in slave castle ports, left behind in journeys of no return. Connection to ancestral spirits and gods proliferated in the gallery, represented at the entrance to the exhibition by Veve of Ogun <\/em>(2024) hanging overhead. The ornate-patterned piece is the religious symbol for Ogun, the god of iron, and was forged by a Nigerian metalsmith commissioned by Ogunlesi. The artist and the metalsmith share the \u201cOgun\u201d signature in their names. In Africa, it\u2019s believed that those who share this name are descendants of the god. For diasporic people removed from African spirituality and given a white Christian Jesus in its place, to be greeted by a Black \u201cgod\u201d was already a dream beyond our wildest imaginings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Black Atlantic <\/em>(1993),<\/em> the British sociologist and scholar Paul Gilroy writes, \u201cShips were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected.\u201d Ogunlesi takes the nightmare of the slave ship and transforms these \u201cshifting spaces\u201d into safe havens in Wasp <\/em>(2024), which references the name of a slave ship built in Newfoundland. It was one of the nineteen documented slave ships built on Canada\u2019s east coast between 1751 and 1792. The ship would sail to the United Kingdom before arriving in Calabar, Nigeria, to ferry precious human cargo to the Caribbean. Through his research, Ogunlesi discovered that an average of seventy-seven Africans at a time would be collected from slave ports in Calabar, and out of that number, typically no more than sixty-nine would survive. He memorializes these sixty-nine humans with sixty-nine cowrie shells set within an oblong sphere on wooden legs. The absence of the eight lives lost on the voyage is also lost to the piece, making this both a celebration of survival and a way to grieve those who did not survive. Ogunlesi merges the natural world with the fantastical through an assemblage reminiscent of an African hut made of mud and clay, materials that a certain species of wasps also use to build their nests. The structure resembles a rocket ship, offering an Afrofuturistic spin that envisions the mud hut as a technology merging African mysticism, liberation, and engineering to provide an escape from enslavement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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