It is fitting then that Ojih Odutola is one of eight artists drawn from Nigeria and its diaspora to show works as part of the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale under the theme, Nigeria Imaginary. For the Biennale, Ojih Odutola turns to the Mbari House, a historic centrepiece of Igbo culture and, in its modern usage, an incubator/conservatory in post-independence Nigeria, where vibrant salons were held by the Nigerian literati. In Igbo mythology, the Mbari House is a shrine gallery built to appease the primary deities of a pantheon. Ala being the highest Alusi (deity) in the Igbo pantheon, responsible for the earth, morality, fertility and creativity. The Mbari House is open-sided and square-shaped. Large enough to hold representational figures (often life-sized and painted) of minor and major deities, ancestors, creatures of legend, colonial actors within a community and animals within its structure. Ojih Odutola’s stated interest in the Mbari House is its place as a ‘center of creative exuberance in post-independence Nigeria.’ But both forms work as interpretations of the artist’s focus.
For the pavilion, Ojih Odutola envisions Ààlà’s (Ala’s) entry point into earth as through an accidental portal. Ojih Odutola’s earth is not quite the fixed plane where human life must unfold within an ecological environment and with contractual social systems. But a coincidence: any number of creation accidents or mischief may have led to the formation of this patch of land and portal. The artist measures time on a mythic scale and her heroes or representational figures are women from key events in recent history or mythology.
The main space imagined by Ojih Odutola and peopled with vivid and faded out forms made with pastel and charcoal on linen, is an Ilé Oriaku. A sacred, yet free zone structure, where gods and mortals might mingle. The name of this structure is itself a conjoining of the Yoruba word for house and the Igbo word for a woman who has chosen a life of pleasure. Some of the women here could very well be objects of worship. Others stand solitary and contemplative. But, in the spirit of the more modern Mbari Club, they are liberal, intertribal and, with good reason when the occasion demands it, anarchic.
The Nigeria imaginary as Emelife intends for us to think of it is an interpretative machine where the imagination, she tells ArtNews, is a ‘fertile and powerful tool of liberation. In the imaginary, we can dream but we can also reckon with ideas of utopia.’ In Ojih Odutola’s approach, the imaginary, populated with new ideologies and the restaging of social orders, is closer to Gilles Deleuze’s definition of an arena where ‘games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection’ can occur. You understand exactly what she gives us access to, and what becomes possible when the artist considers the historical material, folklore or mythologies.
Ojih Odutola’s imaginary, very like her women, commands attention. In figurations reminiscent of the illustrations from old edition novels of the Heinemann African Writers Series, with world-built details and topographies, the line marks in A Countervailing Theory tell a graphic history. The body of work, a product of the artist’s collaboration with the Barbican, has as its source material a series of ancient pictorial markings found on black shale rock in the mountains of Jos, Plateau. You feel in the drawings a parallel world. A duplicate earth and a Jos elsewhere, where the living happens just outside the borders of reality. In this Jos, alongside lived history, there are netherworlds within the rock formations with their own recorded history, evolutions, social systems, codes and deities. This world Ojih Odutola conjures is not some Mad Max: Fury Road fantasy/sci-fi society. The formal structure onto which the artist projects her imagination is, again, matrilineal. Female warriors, the Eshu, rule over the Koba, humanoid men manufactured to work in mines and cultivate food for their superiors. She renders a society that is tribal with distinctions between the fictional Koba and the Eshu, encoded using different line marks. Ojih Odutola places this imagined ancient civilization within a rocky terrain to situate them; and with a cast of characters, she tells the story of forbidden love, in which an enslaved Koba, Aldo, and a female leader of the Eshu, Akanke, must confront with truth the frames of their separate existences and one another.
The point of this exercise is a wild reimagining of the Black figure, at once an extension of the artist’s conception of the self within society and an embodiment of the Black body as something beyond the other. The figures are as the artist intends, ‘vulnerable yet dignified, strong as well as instantly fragile.’ (Think Africa Press, 2011). In a 2021 monograph, The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, Ojih Odutola places her subjects, an aristocratic clan, within a landscape where they enact casual and eventful encounters. These encounters make concrete our imagination of them as familial and inevitable, impossible to imagine otherwise.
