Following the success of her recent exhibition and the release of her monograph, Toyin Ojih Odutola converses with Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou about drafts, reverence, expanded spectrums of portraiture, and how the best surfaces are always the most frustrating ones.
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou: I find your framing and making of space wonderfully expansive and thought-provoking. Ilé Oriaku not only remakes the space of the Mbari house into an at once personal and depersonalised zone, a teleological and imaginative Tardis of a place, but also reflects back onto the spaces it is housed. The book builds on the work shown at the Nigerian Pavilion as part of the Venice Biennale, as well as the Kunsthalle Basel, and it is situated within the beautifully spacious and grand walls of Jack Shainman Gallery’s Lafayette Street site. These, too, are houses of a kind allowing for all sorts of transformations and transportations, but I feel your work specifically capitalises on the potential for galleries, museums and institutional spaces to do this (they don’t always, of course). Would you say your work shapes the surrounding material spaces in its presentation of alternate sites and surroundings? And has it, in turn, been shaped by them? I’m thinking of your approach to the Barbican Curve Gallery here also. Are you renegotiating and recreating space on and off the paper, the wall, and the room?
Toyin Ojih Oditola: The ability to forget where you are is profound and wonderful. I like what it reveals. What I draw are figures in spaces, wherein the construction of space is always embodied. The figures, landscape and interior are the same. Because of this, they can shift, change, and require different modes of application. Variations on perspective make for more engaging pictures, I think. On jump, I never know what the picture will be. That helps.
Method as a project becomes identity, I guess – the method being decisions we make and what holds our attention. The act of answering identity as how the world treats you is exhausting, though. It forces you to measure your worth ahead of yourself – as you speak, as you try to express agency, as you try to get the job done. How well you succeed depends on how good a liar you are.
Visually, this is judged by the business of metaphors, only suggesting where you anchor yourself. How you relay that within the dynamics of a space affects what you see. You can decide to communicate violently if how you create spaces is cruel and exclusive. Working within a selective language for so long, you might forget your own. You might forget you have options. I’m trying to find how that reads when I draw. At the core has always been reverence, not for the work or the space alone, but rather for what could be when they’re in concert.
HHG: Judging from installation photographs of Lafayette Street and what I could read about it, the site is Italian Renaissance revival, and this had me thinking about how the artwork of Ilé Oriaku is also an amalgamation of time zones and selves, as well as interpretations of the Mbari house’s purpose and potential. Would you say the works perfectly chime and converse with the multiple lives of this traditional Owerri Igbo space? And does Ilé Oriaku inadvertently expand on the design ideals of the epoch Lafayette Street gestures towards: knowledge-making, world-making, and opening up new modes and positions from which to see and construct language, the self and the world?
TOO: Ilé Oriaku is the combined design of: the Owerri Igbo art-form and belief principles; the will of the Aba Women’s Rebellion in 1929; and The Mbari Club movement’s independent thought. The name comprises Yoruba and Igbo languages of my heritage, and how losses from those tribes – notably memory – found new meanings and coalesce within a person and a community. These are constructions and reconstructions in themselves. They don’t seem to belong together, but do because they share more than they take.
Spaces aren’t solely plot-driven, though. Their idiosyncrasies are invitations for every visitor. When we say, “you are welcome,” is it about what’s been done to a person, a people, a place? I can work with what’s there while careful to leave room for something we are unaware of, something that can be formed from elsewhere. It has to be welcomed without predetermination or measurement. I think my job is to find pause and remembrance in the architecture. Encourage the unexpected, in some manner which accommodates mercurial vitality. Whimsically butch and sprite-like.
HHG: If Ilé means ‘house’ or ‘home’ and Oriaku is the Igbo name for your grandmother, does the title loosely translate to ‘house’ or ‘home’ of Oriaku? This phrase reminds me of the ‘houses’ of drag and queer culture, where alternate families and dynasties form. I wondered if you were gesturing to these alternative homes and spaces too, where multiplicity and authenticity are encouraged and embraced. In Ilé Oriaku, figures are gloriously and queerly transfixed and transformed in and by the space. Should we, then, step into the House of Oriaku, drag-style, and revel in this unfurling of self, time and family?
TOO: However, the title translates to include all that House of Abundance entails. At the opening in Kunsthalle, I was trying to leave. A Swiss woman stopped me, asking whether the people in the drawings were, in fact, all women. I must have looked confused because Mohamed Almusibli wrote the exhibition text stating it was a house populated by spirits. In my mind, they’re untethered. Though I wasn’t inclined to invalidate what “abundance” meant to her, she remained persistent, almost argumentative, asking a question only she could answer. Other people joined in, stating her way of seeing was challenged when I employed fluctuating pronouns to describe the characters. Insisting upon the finality of gender when spirits are involved seemed useless to me. I kept looking to Mohamed to see what was missing. My drawings aren’t selective in how they share what they include. I ended up telling her whatever she saw was hers to believe and promptly exited.
I think people want insurance of spaces because they cannot shake the fear that something they value will be lost. Those spaces should be protected, but to what extent do they become exclusionary? Spectrums are glorious. They render spaces where people can share freely, full of trust, knowing anything could happen. Intimacy with loss in land, memory and body makes me ask: what else could this mean? What else is here, or can be done? Does including more eradicate what’s already there? What might be? I think the configuration alone won’t solve it. And if fear of disappearance, destruction, wrongness, or impending doom is all we’re looking for, the picture becomes that.
As a kid, I forgot how to speak and understand Yoruba – losing my ability to see where I once was. I think when I draw that land comes back, only it takes on another expression, another time, another environment. I don’t see it completely. I don’t need to. Glimpses or facets allow for dreaming whenever I relinquish control. You have to protect that somehow: the luxury to revel, to think, to travel without labour or fear because it shouldn’t be this costly, this gamified and extractive to do so. Can you travel while standing still? I think you can, trying to make out a picture.
HHG: Of course, the space created by your works for this show is one in which the multifaceted experience and expressions of grief are grappled with. In light of this, I wondered if the act of drawing permits you to grapple with the complexities of grief and its complicated expressions? If it’s not too personal to ask, did the drawn works open up new depths and understandings of this aspect of life and loss? And does the act of drawing grant relief and revelation in equal measure? Does drawing provide a house for you to zone in on such thoughts and feelings too?
TOO: There’s a joke playing in my head. It’s corny, but it won’t leave: groups of people, situated at many tables in a cafeteria. It’s big. Not big enough, says one group. So, the table devises a method: citing fractal strategies found in the universe connect to the fabric of their insides. They patent it as a source. You can’t refute our pattern recognition, says another group. So, a conglomerate of table groups is formed, crafting the justification for horror at getting this canteen population down and the romance up. A language is decided on: forgetting. Terrain is travelled across this commissary to mark its distance, giving depth and contour to the world.
Meanwhile, enacting this language fulfils the voracity for unimpeded growth. Unforeseeable dramas ensue. The language swells the cafeteria, affecting the food, the utensils, the floors, the lights, the windows, the coverings, the skin, the air with its sound as entire tables are emptied. Requisite updates on terms and conditions overwhelm generations of the cafeteria’s existence. The world reverberates in the tone of that cafeteria ‘til there’s no meaning left. ‘Til there’s hardly anyone or anything left except the table that started it all. “We can do what we want,” the table says with disembodied voices in unison. “We can destroy ourselves.” The joke hits when the sound of my parents’ pidgin cuts in with: “wut dis commercial sellin’ us, abi?” That sense of humour has carried my family through many stages of grief.
If pictures say how I see grief, it’s when what’s rarely used cavalierly mixes into a discombobulating, atonal collapse of meaning – differing codes, gestures, and signals scrambled. These are adapted languages of transaction. You aren’t trying to piece it all into tidy summaries; you’re finding your way as you go along. What we call “gibberish” in the migrant’s mind can be language learning spent processing grief. One word or phrase can begin from somewhere, and mean many things. When the context in which it’s applied has changed, is it devalued? However far removed you are from disruption says more about how you maintain all the places, all the people, all the names known and unknown that made you. The song ‘Chemical Mark’ by Nemahsis articulates this better than I can here. I think the way we speak and generally understand the world is extremely classified. I know how to draw grief in the most literal way, but sometimes that method isn’t true or possible.
HHG: I wanted to ask about touch. These works are haunted by the haptics of the past as well as the present. Figures are touched by ancestral forces, but also seem ‘touched’ in the sense that they’re singled out, gifted, isolated in this transformative moment. Then there’s also your touch – that of your pen (or whatever stylus you use) and eye, which holds and caresses the figures on the page or linen. There is great care and attention put into your artworks. Could you tell me more about touch and the affective quality of your drawings?
TOO: Drawing with compressed chalk pigment (pastel), charred coal, graphite and pencil on parchment, board, cloth, and film.
The versatility of their mix illuminates the surface. You find that sensation, a rhythm before a picture settles. Time-blindness is blending not too smoothly. When you stop acknowledging time, the picture holds a pulse. I think you can always tell how impatient someone is by their economy. That kind of honesty is urgent. Scarcity creeps in when you yearn to bring back what’s no longer there. I need to consider every mark I choose and want to include as much as I can, but I’m not immune to impatience with friction. Between what needs to be said and what can be done. Retaining a kind of tactility is a dance when the urge to be frictionless gets to you.
The best surfaces are the frustrating ones. The ones that take time. The ones that make you adjust your superstitions and feel less scared. You think on the surface, go places you don’t have to define right away. You throw everything into it, trying to figure it out. It’s sublime – brings a kind of rest, too. Periods of friction, of mistake, of doubt or stumble are the makings of all the combined efforts in the picture. A record of thought that feels impermanent. You find what stays with you where you lavish your attention. There’s no sense of urgency in that spent time. Just wander.
HHG: What element do you begin with? Do the figures evolve as you work, appearing to you? Is it a kind of ancestral channelling occurring through the drawing process? And, lastly, where does this leave portraiture for you, because I feel you’re innovating the genre and elaborating on how portraits embody multiple subjects and evince a collaboration between subject, artist and viewer. Would you say the latter is so?
TOO: I think the beauty and terror of this work is that you can begin from anywhere and stop at any point. That scene from Portrait of a Lady on Fire where Héloïse is looking at her depiction, asking: “Is that how you see me?” And Marianne answers: “There are rules, conventions, ideas. Your presence is made up of fleeting moments that may lack truth.” Héloïse responds that she understands, but there’s no presence – no sign of either of them in the picture. Simply an object for sale. That’s how the portrait functions. It’s a category I’ve been taught. That’s why I’m constantly messing with it. In my mind, they must be drawings. Their function isn’t the final cut. Always the draft, never fully-formed. Something about that quality makes me wanna try.
HHG: I wondered if there are any books that have infiltrated these works or found their way into the Mbari house and intermixed with the stories being told there? Or have you left the door open to viewers to continue the story/stories unfolding in the drawn spaces of Ilé Oriaku?
TOO: Four art books that stayed open were about Kitagawa Utamaro, Amrita Sher-Gil, Helene Schjerfbeck and Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos.
HHG: What does drawing mean to you in light of this specific exhibition, and where would you like to take it (or for it to take you) next?
TOO: The same person is the same place is the same word is the same mark. They hold more than we know. They can transform. It’s unkind what efficiency does over time. The right for meanings to shift without harm, or shape slowly, stands antithetical to the language of efficiency. The speed at which it’s enacted dictates how we move, how we build, and ultimately, how we respect ourselves. We are many incongruous meanings embodied and are exquisite for it. What we create shouldn’t be defined by how well we exploit or have been exploited.
