OLU OGUNNAIKE
Artist Olu Ogunnaike’s work incorporates sculpture, printmaking, performance and installation. He often uses trees and the products made from them, seeing wood as a repository of memory and marker of possible encounters. For his first museum show, Crumbs, at Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2021, he focused on Bordeaux’s pine industry and the little-known history of the region’s richest merchant families transitioning from slave trading to wine production after the first abolition of slavery in France in 1794. It featured an eight-metre-long pine table on which he held a meal for the museum staff and then burned using shou sugi ban, a traditional Japanese wood-preserving technique. He then sanded the rafters in the 19th-century building, originally a warehouse for colonial produce, taking some dust to make silkscreen prints, but leaving a thin layer on the floor and walls that museum-goers then disturbed when visiting the show. He has also shown at Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022), Museum Folkwang, Essen (2021), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021) and Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz (2021). He talked to TANK about his recent exhibition An Enclosed Garden, at gb agency in Paris.
Interview by Poppy ColesPortrait courtesy Olu Ogunnaike
Poppy Coles Storytelling is an important through-line in your work. It’s something that humans have always done and how history is made.
Olu Ogunnaike It’s intriguing to know that stories have lasted as long as they have. For the show in Paris, I wanted to play with the idea of what deems stories relevant or worth keeping. And how does this relate to how our societal systems were created and are maintained? It’s a way to look at civilisation and the structures we’ve created for ourselves, which we are clearly stuck in and aren’t extremely helpful.
PC You mention structures: at gb agency, you walk in the door and through a wooden frame. Viewers are immediately implicated or incorporated into the work. You are forced to consider yourself in relation to the structure of the space.
OO Everyone is “framed” by society; we’re all part of systems that are somewhat not of our choosing. How often do we question them? How do we navigate through them? Why are we in this frame and not in another? I wanted to make the frames literal by implicating the physical structure of a building.
PC Tell me about the wood you used.
OO In Bordeaux, I made a wine cabinet, You are here [2021]. The cabinet’s body was made of French pine while its interior was made of various “exotic” hardwoods that are native in former French colonies. There was mirrored stainless steel on both sides so that when you walked around it, you’d see a reflection of yourself. As wine matures, it gains value; I’m interested in the wine cabinet as a repository for that value, and time, history and commodity. I wanted to do something similar with the show in Paris, so that as soon as you stepped into the gallery, you didn’t have a choice, you were in the system. I thought a lot about the structure of the white cube and the potential to create a different reference for value.
PC Was this show the first time you’d worked with precious metals?
OO I made a bronze crowbar for London Plain in 2020. It was the first time I’d cast metal. It was used to pull up the floorboards I’d laid – until it snapped; well actually, it was still functional even after it had broken.
PC Did you like that it broke? Was it the wrong type of metal to use for a crowbar?
OO Absolutely. I always knew it was fragile. It cracked when they were making it, so it was already welded together. It was nice because the wood for the floorboards had already taken such a beating. It had been moved from various locations around London and chopped up into a parquet floor, then it was chipped away at constantly by this piece of metal and eventually it was as if it said, “Fuck no, we’re breaking the metal”. It was playful. For the show in Bordeaux, I also made a solid sterling-silver corkscrew that was screwed into the wall. That was the start of working with precious metals. They’re a signifier of a certain type of value; I like to disregard that value by making the material function differently.
PC In Paris, you made bronze, silver and gold nails, three of which were hammered to the gallery wall in a line. They were very understated, but they had a presence; they felt like characters.
OO They were really significant characters! They were a definition of value being attached to the white cube. Having a solid gold nail hammered into the wall spoke of the value placed on objects that hang on them, and hopefully leaned into that story, as well as the oldest of stories. The wooden cross did that, too. I was also working with deaccessioned library books that were no longer considered of value, which made me think about the stories that remain, that we hold on to. One of the oldest examples of that is the story of Christ. The nails and cross were a nod to that, and to the white cube being another story to which we assign value. It was a tongue-in-cheek gesture about hierarchies. Elsewhere I added weeds, which are not considered precious. They are disregarded despite their beauty. If you take weeds and discarded book pages and drive a gold nail through them into a wall that represents a system of value, are these things then considered beautiful or precious?
PC There’s an overlaying of things: materials, values, hierarchies. As the viewer we’re able to consider them from every angle, literally. I appreciated that I could walk around the large, charcoal silkscreen [No Longer Followed] and see the pages pasted together and charcoal seeping through. The structures you are pointing to have a rigidity to them – the hardness of wood, metal and walls – but you’ve made them porous. You’ve created space for movement within them.
OO It was a way to create an openness to the investigation of these things. To see the mechanics of the artworks, to see behind the stories. By doing that, perhaps they become less special, less revered, less sacred. In that, I think, lies a crucial facet of understanding the world we’re in. It allows us to see that we can change things. If we investigate the structures we’re in, we will have the ability to move through these systems and say, OK, this isn’t right for us. I wanted the space to present an opportunity for that investigation. If the audience wants to look closer, they might have to physically bend or distort themselves to see it in a new way.
PC There were absences, too: open or excavated spaces, things omitted and spaces left to be filled.
OO They’re also a way for me to admit that I’m not sure! I don’t know the answer. I’m inviting the audience to come on this journey with me and, hopefully, together we can have a conversation. It would be counterintuitive to make a show about the hierarchy of values and systems and then say that this is the only way to view them, that this is good and worth keeping, and the other thing isn’t. I’m still unsure.
PC It’s interesting that you use the word openness. The show felt very open, so the title of the show was a notable contrast: An Enclosed Garden.OO The title comes from a trope in medieval art: hortus conclusus in Latin. The Virgin Mary is depicted in a garden surrounded by four walls, one behind the perspective of the viewer. It’s a metaphor for her sanctity: enclosed in these walls, she is considered sacred or undisturbed. She has been depicted like this throughout the ages. Using it for the show’s title was a nod to the image’s history and the story behind it. For years her sanctity has been epitomised in these paintings and through the repetition of these images, there was a declaration of ideas of value, or better yet truth.
PC You have the recurring motif of an image of the weeds.
OO That’s my take on the hortus conclusus. It’s a reference to a friend’s garden. It’s full of weeds but the flowers are extremely beautiful. By reproducing it, I wanted to see if I could take an image, and regardless of what it was, regardless of the story, see what happens when it’s repeated. Does it become valuable? It was similar with the pages pressed together. Value through repetition.
PC The silver origami boats were an incredibly poetic part of the show. They felt like vessels to help navigate the show but they were also…
OO Anchors?
PC Anchors, yes.
OO The idea for them originally stemmed from Foucault’s idea of heterotopias. The idea of systems existing within other systems. Spaces that have their own laws within an established structure. A ship, for example: wherever it is in the world, it has its own laws. There’s a lesson in there about existing as individuals within this larger set of laws and principles. How can we escape the systems we are trapped in? The boat is the perfect representation of that. You can stay or leave. The origami boats are made from the library-book pages; they’re made from discarded stories. How can we escape these stories? In an origami boat, but made from silver, with holes in it? It’s not going to float; it’s not functional; it’s beautifully counterintuitive, and somehow, not optimistic, but playfully pessimistic. As much as we want to leave, there’s a lot of things that need to change before we can really leave these systems. It is a poetic question.
PC I noticed one boat on the gallery director’s desk, just outside of the exhibition space. I liked that. The space for the art is in question. Few people probably noticed it, but you also didn’t hide it away. It was just there, off to the side.
OO That’s the whole question, right? How do we define the white cube and its boundaries? I like to look at every facet of a space.
PC Can you talk about the work Before Your Time in the show? It’s a piece of wood into which you laser-cut the image of the weeds, and it’s what, 500 years old? How did you source it?
OO It’s 5,300 years old! It’s interesting because it’s an object that precedes all of the other systems and stories that are alluded to in the show. It’s pretty special: a piece of bog oak from the Fens in Norfolk. It was an oak tree that fell into the marshland and stayed there for thousands of years until it was eventually discovered. It’s like wood gold dust because you can’t produce it, not like a piece of ebony, for example. There’s something undeniable about its qualities, its characteristics – that undeniable thing is time.
PC How did it feel intervening on a piece of wood that old?
OO The same way it felt to intervene on everything else, even if it was more precious. If I’m talking about the disruption of value systems, then I kind of have to grit my teeth and say, you know what, it’s just another piece of wood. Of course, it’s not, but it is, too. The engraving was a way to navigate these questions, and the lightness to the etching hopefully shows my trepidation about disturbing this piece of wood.
PC And there’s a much larger vacated space opposite it.
OO Yes, Leftovers. It’s something I’ve done whenever I’ve produced charcoal works. I hang the silkscreen on the gallery wall so that when I dust off the excess to reveal the image, you’re left with this trace of the production, which I call “leftovers”. This work is next to the gallery’s main window. That’s usually the most precious wall because it can be viewed from the outside. Putting that work there was a way to play with that using absence. There’s something sacred about emptiness and quietness. I liked that the newest work in the show was opposite the oldest; it was a nice conversation. ◉