"OLU OGUIBE" curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

The exhibition is part of the gallery festival with international curators in Vienna "curated by"

With this eponymous exhibition, Galerie Kandlhofer hosts painter, sculptor, conceptual, artist, poet, curator, scholar and art critic, Olu Oguibe, in his first one-person gallery show in Austria.

The backbone of the exhibition is a tripartite of monumental and commemorative works which Oguibe has produced from the year 2000 onwards. Monumental not only because of their importance or aesthetic brilliance, their conspicuousness to posterity, but also monumental because with these works, Oguibe has crafted spaces, forms and ideas that in themselves serve as memorials of particular events, moments, histories or occurrences within world history. Such incisive moments and realities we cannot afford to overlook nor forget, and neither can we afford to wait for some institutions to raise ‘official’ monuments for their remembrance.

While the works do not need to be monuments, they perform the core characteristics of mnemonic devices — that is the ability to make think of, to remind, to remember. Without wanting to delve into the current debate of the felling of confederate, colonial, racist and otherwise violent monuments around the world, it is worth taking some time to pose the question: what is remembered, by who, for whom and from what vantage point? One might fairly say that one thing the monuments being pulled down have in common is the fact that they were made to celebrate those who, in one way or the other, were perpetrators of despicable violences.
The three works that make the foundation of this exhibition, however, speak from the vantage point of the disenfranchised, of those who have had to suffer and bear the burden of monumental violence. These works speak with the sensibilities and sensitivities of a history of those oppressed, without needing or trying to be moralistic. Rather, in their forms and aesthetics, the works perform the crux or that which is embedded in the German term for memorial, Denkmal, which is to think (denken) and again, by, time after time (mal). In this way, they go a long way to serve as mementos, commemorare, to bring to remembrance.

Speaking before the Art and Health session of the World Congress on Medicine and Health in Hanover on July 27, 2000, Oguibe expatiated on the magnitude of the AIDS pandemic in Africa:
    "As we speak, experts estimate that 13 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have already died of AIDS. That is more than the entire populations of whole countries put together. Another 10 million are expected to die over the next five years. (…) On the average no family would be spared a death, no community let untouched, and no culture could claim to be whole again. It is no consolation to know that by the middle of this century, if this crisis is unchecked, sub-Saharan Africa would have lost more human beings and resources to the AIDS plague than it did in all of four centuries of slave trade, internal wars, and colonial domination. We are speaking, then, of an epic holocaust the like of which has not been seen before. We are looking at the valley of the dry bones."
Then, he posed some pertinent questions to the medical professionals gathered in Hanover, that happen to be of particular relevance to not only this exhibition in Vienna, but to the essence of art as a whole:
    "One looks at the African predicament and wonders; how can we speak of art in the face of such calamity? How does one think of art in the face of survival itself? How does one make art among the dead and the dying? We are here today to investigate the role of art in human health and well-being. But in a predicament where entire populations are under threat of annihilation, and with them the heritage and cultural memory of centuries, perhaps the imperative is not to find the role of art in health, but to look instead into the role of health in the survival of a people and its culture. Art is for the living, and in a land of the dead, how can there be art?"

Okigbo, the poet, the librarian, the activist, the field-commissioner joined the rebel army of the secessionist Republic of Biafra in 1967, to fight against the oppressions of the Nigerian state, and was killed on the field in Nsukka a few weeks after the onset of the Biafra war. This war of genocide by the Nigerian army against the Igbo, mostly, but also the Annang, Efik, Ejagham, Eket, Ibeno, Ibiobio and Ijaw, is at the core of Oguibe’s second piece in the tripartite in this exhibition. Commissioned for the Athens section of documenta 14 where it was first exhibited, Biafra Time Capsule is a visual and sonic journey into, through, and by one of the most mediatized and discoursed conflicts of the 20th century. Magazines, novels, history books, photographs, speeches and other props that tell of the unfathomable atrocities of the Biafra war guide the viewer through this peregrination into a not so long distant past that still echoes in the present. Being caught up in the Biafra Time Capsule is encountering the history of the war that lasted 1967 to 1970, which Oguibe experienced firsthand as a child. In this time capsule witnesses from within and without share their experiences from a plethora of vantage points of ethnic, economic and political, religious and cultural factors that fuelled the war and enabled a genocide as the world watched on while millions of Biafran children, men and women were killed on the front, or from starvation and illnesses.
The Biafra Time Capsule is also a testimony of the impact of imagery, imagination and images in mass communication, in the arts as much as on the psyche of a people. It is impossible to erase the images of starving or malnourished Biafran children from our collective memories. The Biafra Time Capsule gives us a frame, an ‘encadrement’ might be a better notion, within which one can shell oneself while embarking on this journey of encountering such violent histories, or it might be the capsule within which the bitter pills of history are encapsulated for us to swallow — though with caution, but without losing its tenacity, at the end.

Like with other iconic and monumental works, Oguibe's most recent work embarks on and tackles the crisis we all find ourselves in with the latest and ongoing global pandemic. The images of endless queues of military vans carrying corpses in Italy, images of mass graves in the central park, images of soldiers in their military outfits patrolling the streets around the world ensuring people stay at home, the images of deserted streets taken over by rodents and other shy animals, just as much as the images of oversaturated hospitals or makeshift clinics in football stadium all over the world cannot leave us indifferent. The images and the soundbites of the pandemic can be actually so overwhelming that one can't see the forest for the trees. When I expressed a slight concern in an email to the artist about the rush by some artists to try to tackle difficult sociopolitical issues while they still unfold and without the distance afforded to see what is at stake, he replied: "With the pandemic, the experience is ongoing as you rightly point out, and the flurry of images and the noise of media coverage are part of that ongoing experience. Still, not all aspects of the experience are actually shared. The idea of mass graves in New York City in 2020 is too surreal and distant to register in most people's minds. Leave it for a couple of years, and it becomes intellectualised as a subject of study, and even more distant when presented as art. It becomes aesthetic."

In another recent email exchange for the exhibition, the artist wrote that his exhibition is about
the precariousness of existence and the ever-presence of cataclysmic or colossal, life-changing crises: be it war, pandemics, or other upheavals that always have the potential to turn our collective of personal worlds upside down, including displacement and inevitable flight from home. In looking at the challenges of our existence in the permanent shadow of colossal, these works also remind us of human resilience and fortitude, and the need always to rise to our better selves in order to help both us and others cope. (…) The works themselves are traces, diaries, archives, quiet comments snatched from carefully gathered fragments of history and experience that are not only pertinent to this moment but resonant across time. The different circumstances themselves remind us of how insignificant we often are in the face of cataclysmic crises like a pandemic or civil strife, and yet how critically important we are in facing up to such crises and containing them.

Another thread of reflection that could arise within the framework of the works presented in this exhibition would be the notion of ruination. Not the ruin itself or the debris, but an engagement and reflection on the project, the acts, the processes of ruination. In thinking about Oguibe’s body of work from the 1980s until today, one is lured into reading works like the Biafra Time Capsule (2017), Das Fremdlinge und Flüchtlinge Monument (2017), Ashes (2002) on the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the world trade centre, Many Thousand Gone (2000), Oklahoma (1995), a memorial for the children who died in the Oklahoma bombing, to name but a few, through the prism of perilous states of being. In “Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination,” Ann Laura Stoler discusses ruinations as processes that “bring ruin upon.” As she writes “By definition, ruination is an ambiguous term, being an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. These three senses may overlap in effect, but they are not the same. Each has its own temporality. Each identifies different durations and moments of exposure to a range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct. By the dictionary again, ruination is a process that brings about ‘severe impairment, as of one’s health, fortune, honor, or hopes.’ Conceptually, ruination may condense those impairments or sunder them apart.”

To think of Prof. Dr. Olu Oguibe’s art works in this context is to deliberate on the vulnerabilities of our being, of the sandy grounds on which human relations are built, on the uncertainties we are constantly confronted with in this world we have crafted for more worse than better since the birth of the capitalist and colonial enterprises, it is to think of the decrepitude of health and social systems in countries with the most sophisticated economies in the world in which the scissors between the rich and the poor is unacceptably wide. Though Oguibe’s works are not about ruination, the works are reminders that we’re often one chance moment away from (potential) ruination, and highlight the ever-present threat of ruination. To cogitate on Oguibe’s work in this context is to accept the atomity of the human experience in the largess and colossality of planetary being, it is to reflect on deeply corrupt systems that enable unhinged sociopolitical, health, economic structures carved and conditioned by precarity that have enabled forced migration and flight, wars and illnesses across the globe. An engagement with (as in ‘Auseinandersetzung mit’) Oguibe’s work is thus to embrace humility in the face of such moments of magnitudinous adversities and their prolongations in the history of human presence on earth. But it is especially to think of how singular and collective human efforts and humane interventions have been and will be crucial in overcoming  these moments of exigencies. It is to think of art not just as a form of expression or witness or comfort or alleviation, but essentially as the straw to clutch on when drowning. Art as the “cotyledon of light that defies the night.” So, an engagement with Oguibe’s art is also to think of how humanity escapes and survives precarity, as much as to deliberate on rehabilitation, recuperation and reparation in times when Things Fall Apart.

If you are afraid of your reflection
do not come my way
at times I am a mirror
 
If I am a receptacle
you will see your life
and the particles of your death
collected in me
 
There is no serenity here
past the slow rattle of our quick decay
lying in ambush around the street corners
 
Mirror or receptacle where no dreams
come to roost in the night, I travel
from where we have been to
where we might have been
 
Keorapetse Kgositsile, excerpt from “Things Fall Apart (after and for China Achebe)” in This Way I Salute You

                                                                                                             Text: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Curator