space comma space comma space
Tiwani Contemporary
24 Cork St, London
April 3-May 24, 2025Wura-Natasha Ogunji's upcoming exhibition space comma space comma space embraces not-knowing, the breaking of habits, irreverence and the use of mistakes as integral components of the creative process. Through works on paper, the artist creates a memoir of her time inside the studio - through acts of stitching, cutting, tearing and tracing. The drawings, paintings, and collages are in conversation through shared marks and methods, as well as through titles which suggest a more literal dialogue between the works themselves.
With this new body, Ogunji uses magazine pages, gessoed tissue paper, and glassine, as well as the architectural tracing paper for which she is known. Many of the works have an almost-hyperbolic density to them--especially when considered alongside her past ouevre where stitched figures are commonly surrounded by large expanses of paper-space. There is an irreverence for the correct way materials should be used: oil paint on tracing paper, a two-sided painting (where only one side is visible, but both are important), or the combination of oil and ink forming a resist pattern of dots along the surface of the trace.
In other works, like Lagoon in Tatters, cut paper becomes fringe, leaving two large openings, the paper falling beyond the edges of its own borders. In a similar drawing, those same lagoon lines become an oasis. Or, perhaps the large hole in the paper is the space of refuge. This dance between the fullness, or presence of (artistic) matter, and absence is a recurring language throughout the show, lending an almost-trickster like quality to the work, especially when considered in concert with the titles. The four painting-drawings on gessoed tracing paper present a poetic riddle with their titles:
What I want
something something
same same
a thing in a thing in a thing, the mountain was mentioned, are you my mother?The mother figure appears often in the form of the Gelede mask, part of the Yoruba ritual festival for celebrating women and mothers. For the artist, the paper itself becomes a ritual space. The lines, gestures, marks, motion, cuts and cutaways of thread, graphite, ink, paint, paper and earth are the elemental languages of ______________, _______________, ________________. Here space takes on multiple meanings. It is, of course, form, emptiness, but, and, another space entirely. The stillness of the comma; the thing around the thing you're trying to get at; a lull but not a lapse. The paper, too, has polyrhythm.
Archives and Memories
Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos
9 McEwen Street, Sabo, Yaba
February 12-May 31, 2025Curated by Favour Ritaro Archives and Memories features artists Ndidi Dike, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, Odun Orimolade, Taiye Idahor, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji. The exhibition examines the interplay of personal and collective memory through the archives of these Nigerian artists whose practice intersected with the late founder of the CCA, Bisi Silva.
Image: Two, 2010 (Image: Sonseree Gibson)
A Conscious Relation: body/mind/movements
Tiwani Contemporary
24 Cork Street, London
February 6-March 22, 2025featuring artists Virginia Chihota, Alicia Henry, Joy Labinjo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Dawit L. Petros, Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), Leo Robinson
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
Artist Profile by curator Eva Barois De CaevelAWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions is a non-profit Association Loi 1901, co-founded in 2014 and directed by Camille Morineau, curator and art historian, specialising in women artists. “The primary ambition of AWARE is to rewrite the history of art on an equal footing. Placing women on the same level as their male counterparts and making their works known is long overdue.”
Since its creation in 2014, AWARE has worked to make women artists of the 20th century visible, producing and posting free bilingual (French/English) content about their work on its website.
The biographies published online largely originate from the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (Universal dictionary of female creators), published in 2013 thanks to a partnership with the Éditions des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque. This directory brings together women artists born between 1860 and 1972 working in visual arts, with no limitations on medium or country. The partnerships developed with museums, universities and art historians, as well as with sponsors and cultural events in France and abroad have contributed to the development of AWARE’s online database, updated weekly with new artist profiles and research articles.
