Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou looks to Ilé Oriaku, Toyin Ojih Odutola’s recent exhibition, to understand how the artist uses titles as entry points, reimagines the Mbari house, and reclaims the transformative and trans-liberatory inheritance which her ancestors intended for her.
To what extent is a title a threshold? This is a question I often ask myself when analysing a poem or short story. We often come to books with expectations; desires aroused by the front cover, the blurb, the suggestion of a friend, a reviewer, or a bookseller. But titles—phrases that either allude to or elude the sense of a work—can push us into judgment before we’ve even turned the first page. If this is true of books, how much more so of art? Titles to works, whether they are abstract or figurative, ostensibly offer a map of meaning, a clue to guide us towards a supposed end. Yet we know this is not always the case. Titles are, indeed, thresholds, but into what room or realm or rite of passage they will lead us, we cannot always tell.
This is true when it comes to the titles of Toyin Ojih Odutola’s ever-expansive works. The names of her exquisite artworks are thresholds into other worlds, poetic gestures to the grander dramas of a single image or series. A consummate storyteller, one whose practice is inspired by diverse literary and visual forms (comics, animé, contemporary novels), Ojih Odutola’s titles “frame the frame”—that is, they are preludes to the event of her drawings, external announcements that speak into the interior areas, actions and atmospheres represented before us. In her recent exhibition, however, titles are not always convenient stepping stones into the meaning or depicted matter of a work. Ilé Oriaku, the title of Ojih Odutola’s recent exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, for example, at once deflects and reflects the central themes and subjects of this recent repertoire. With Ilé meaning “house,” “home,” or “building” in Yoruba and Oriaku being the Igbo name of the artist’s late grandmother, the loose translation of the title—“home of Oriaku” or “Oriaku’s house”—certainly encapsulates the personal and social themes of family, tradition, ritual and worship which are so essential to the exhibition as a whole. But the title also deliberately deceives our growing expectations around the intentions and representations of the work. Ilé Oriaku is not simply a temple dedicated to the dead or a holy shrine invoking one deity alone. Rather, it “houses” many spirits and “homes” a multitude of lives and modes of living. It is an exposition that leads us into one zone only to land us in another. The title thus becomes more than a threshold, encompassing within its at once respectful and playful phrasal construction the near palatial possibilities of Ojih Odutola’s drawings and overall practice.
As a title, Ilé Oriaku allows us to step into a specific space, albeit one with extraordinarily looser demarcations and fortifications than any ordinary roofed dwelling. Centred around the sacred site of the Mbari house—a traditional building made by members of the Nigerian Owerri Igbo community for ritualistic and devotional purposes—the exhibition title looks to an actual architectural and material reality. And yet, no matter how concrete and culturally resonant this site is to viewers, Ojih Odutola alters what it is and does, broadening and deepening and lengthening the dimensions of the Mbari house, and thereby the stories and subjectivities that exist within it. Where the Mbari House of the Owerri Igbo people would be crafted out of clay, straw and wood and adorned and decorated with ancestral, deific, or mythological figures, Ojih Odutola’s depiction boasts more rarefied surfaces and décor—though they are of no less spiritual and existential significance. Refraction and abstraction, both of the original Mbari house and Ojih Odutola’s rendition, are everywhere encountered, with glass and gloss, lucent and layered veils, rich draperies and dress, elegant accessories alongside ceremonial accoutrements simultaneously obscuring and elucidating a figure, and sometimes emanating from as well as decorating the bodies we behold. The artist’s house, then, not only transforms the notion of the Mbari structure but also those who inhabit her interpretation of it. Poised to move from the thresholds of Ojih Odutola’s titles and the Renaissance Revival space of the Jack Shainman Gallery into the auspicious and sumptuous surrounds of her works, might we be more than witnesses to these glorious transformations? Might we, too, be transformed?
One image that dramatises this spatial and existential transmogrification is ENGLIGBO (Mbari House Entrance) (2023). Drawn in pastel and charcoal on linen, ENGLIGBO tilts our understanding of the Mbari House space and the occurrences possible there. Positioned on a diagonal axis, diverse temporalities, alongside the composite cultures and creations emerging from them, flit and flow across the linen: an oil lamp whose light distils and distends across the hallucinatory outline of a feminised figure, the veiled face of a man, a gloved hand and the now apparitional solidity of a sculpture—all such totems of time emerge and converge in the titular ‘entrance’ to this ripe and radical site. Step in, Ojih Odutola says, see your own coordinates, bodily and mental, shift and spill towards glorious, copious indistinction. Posited in the centre of this glowing revolution of forms is the aforementioned man, beautifully haloed with a translucent crystalline veil (a votive’s robe?) and wearing a red leather glove and gleaming green and gold beads. Does this flux of selves and scenes emanate from him, or are we encountering the space as he will inevitably see and be in it?
That we cannot fully answer such questions is precisely the point. Ojih Odutola constructs sites of unsteadiness, indeterminate zones where the simultaneous process of becoming and unbecoming unfolds, layer upon gorgeous layer, in sheens and skeins formerly unseen. Moving us beyond the threshold of a title, a gallery, a room, an instance, Ojih Odutola embraces what is beyond the sharp edges we carve for ourselves, whether they are crafted of skin and bone, clay and glass, shade and light. The development of selfhood is concurrent with the limits—or, in this case, limitlessness—of the “house” in which one exists: space shapes the self and the self equally creates the spatial environment, but what happens when both channel beyond the here and now, the fleshly and the material? What happens when the demarcations between past, present and future are renounced in favour of communication between ancestors and their descendants? In ENGLIGBO, ancestral and prospective realities merge, former and future selves interact, and visions of yesterday conflate with those of tomorrow. Yet these trans-historical and intergenerational convergences are not represented in ruptures and confusion; rather, Ojih Odutola’s exquisitely precise yet textured mark-making is designed to capture the subtle magic of these fusions: the ripple in liquescent glass, the reflection in an opaque pane, “the shadow in front of you,” as the artist’s mother, Nelene Ojih Odutola, poetically describes it. All such seemingly trivial details become important points of intercommunication, openings for profound communion, the interstices where prior and potential life coincide.
In Don’t Be Afraid; Use What I Gave You (2023), the past is introjected into the present when a figure appears to a woman inside a mirrored frame. Placing a crimson-gloved finger to her lips, she signals from within the wooden circumference to the more solid protagonist without. Inverting material, textural and linguistic realities here, words are supplanted by actions and the verbal code by the gestural, echoing out in an asymmetrical composition and colour palette (the present figure’s dress is inverted and reflected back to her by her silver spirit counterpart). Again, Ojih Odutola uncannily repeats familiar motifs—the modern ceremonial regalia of old—of beads, gloves, jewellery and glass surfaces from works like ENGLIGBO, as if these elegant objects were accessories to a different kind of signification and elevation, ones of a more esoteric and mystical nature. Like ENGLIGBO, Don’t Be Afraid; Use What I Gave You (an apt ancestral admonition if ever I heard one) contains alternate realms and the cultural vibrations radiating from both in one space, one papery surface, one frame for the two to coalesce, and speak, albeit through gesticulation and chromatic code, one to the other. This is the breathtaking beauty of Ojih Odutola’s work, too; it is not just the careful and fine rendering of these persons and their personal interactions brought together in the ‘time’ of the work, but also the fact that the act of drawing makes this intercommunication happen. The drawn line, Ojih Odutola suggests, channels kinfolk and kinship, ancestral lessons and astral connections.
Drawing, then, is a medium in every sense of the word. In circular undulations and tonal condensations of line that give the impression of paint, Ojih Odutola conjures worlds within one world, diverse bodies within the single body of her drawn work. Yet Ilé Oriaku still gives precedence to the possibilities that place and space—the Mbari house, her home of Oriaku, the environment provided by drawing—affords the individual, particularly the individual who exists on the margins (or, rather, the threshold) of society. The open-ended narrative threaded throughout each drawn part that makes up Ilé Oriaku as a whole creates a stage upon which selfhood across time can flourish, shine and strut in all its various manifestations and visitations. The collective space in Ilé Oriaku, therefore, elicits queer abundance and amplitude—it’s not called House of Oriaku for nothing. It is one where ceremonial masks can be donned to convey one sense of self and the worldly veils can be lifted to reveal another; where the flamboyant drapes of drag can give rise to one character and the removal of cloth and paint release several more. Whether erotically wrapped in ribbons (as in Anyi Di Ayto Ibi (We Become The Third Place), 2023-4), powerfully clad in an oversized fur coat (like in Opin ojo (EOD—End of Day), 2022-23) or languidly lounging in metallic trousers, shirts or tops (seen in Before + After the Evening’s Performance, 2023-4), Ojih Odutola’s (fabulously fashionable) figures not only exude but exalt in their queerness precisely because this charged and cosmic space permits it.
Of course, this is not a new theme in the artist’s repertoire. Ojih Odutola is continually conscious of the importance of space (actual buildings but also metaphorical hubs, arenas, and platforms, as well as the canvas and paper upon which she draws) when it comes to expressing and embracing one’s difference freely, clear of a discriminatory gaze. In her magisterial book, The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obufemi(2021), a collection of famous works which chronicles the lives of a wealthy queer Nigerian dynasty, space is again essential to difference—specifically diversities of queerness and Blackness—being normalised, represented and enjoyed uninhibitedly. Compiled after Goodluck Jonathan signed into law the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act during his presidency and looking towards the recent legal developments (where “cross-dressing” is a criminal offence in twelve states and LGBTQIA+ individuals are prevented from serving in armed forces), The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obufemi brilliantly imagines how queer individuals could and would live without these violent and inhumane political and legal interventions visited on their persons and lives. By her own words, Ojih Odutola draws ‘quiet’ attention to this fictional family and their unions; she insists on the power of their queer love not by contrasting this speculative dynasty with the dark reality their real counterparts would face in Nigeria today, but by centring their stories and allowing their everyday living to occupy and fill up the frame. Space, here, is queered, but that queerness, that difference, is rendered ordinary—beautiful, still, but nothing out of the norm. For this is what giving space to queerness looks like, and this is what could and should have been normality in Nigeria, had colonialism not set in motion the violently legalised homophobic and anti-trans republic of today.
Perhaps this is why Ojih Odutola returns to the precolonial site of the Mbari house of the Igbo Owerri peoples in Ilé Oriaku. Crossing the threshold into her version of this space, we are reminded of what could be, and what really is, away from the current dehumanising laws of the land. Abruptly ended because of colonial endeavours (during and after the Nigerian/Biafran Civil War), the Mbari House and the socio-cultural history and communally unifying practices that came with it vanished. By erecting this space in her work, albeit in her own gleaming colours, Ojih Odutola creates a queer space that is not just, as the title suggests, a ‘house’, but a ‘home’; a quietly radical space where the presence and power of queer individuals—ancestral, futuristic or otherwise—are seen, felt, channelled, embraced, and encountered. Like the superb life-size portraits of The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obufemi, where beautiful couples pose carefree in elegant attire within immaculately marbled or panelled interiors, the equally striking figures, couples, and groupings portrayed in Ilé Oriaku are safe to be and act freely, however indistinct this expression of being may appear.
In this Mbari House, queerness is a happening across multiple times, eras, dimensions and bodies. It is sometimes quiet and subtle in expression, at others loud and luminously evident. But always the space to be queer is present, and in turn the queerness of this space is palpable; this, at a time when queer spaces and individuals are under threat the world over, is an incredibly powerful statement. Whilst the earlier works forming The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obufemi were gently radical in their narrative of free queer existence sans colonial consciousness, those of Ilé Oriaku are forcefully so, not only in skill, scale, size and scope, but in their fearlessness towards depicting and dwelling in the interstitial, in all its spiritual and cultural complexity. This is, I believe, what Ojih Odutola implies by the title, the ilé of Oriaku; this is the transformative and trans-liberatory ‘home’ into which Black Nigerians are encouraged to step; this is the sacred inheritance which their long-lost loved ones, like Ojih Odutola’s Oriaku, intended for them. Standing on the threshold of these works, will we, in turn, cross over and come face to face with the truths ourselves, only to return wonderfully, magically, entirely transformed?
