Oluseye OgunlesiBLACK EXODUS: WINTER ARRIVAL

Oluseye Ogunlesi is a Nigerian-Canadian artist who examines Blackness through sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. His travels have taken him on an Afro-diasporic journey through Africa, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Plantations, beaches, and other sites related to the migratory journeys of Black people — forced or otherwise — are where he has collected or documented the location of objects that he reimagines as talismans left behind. BLACK EXODUS: WINTER ARRIVAL told how the movement of Black people, forced or intentional, is a story of resistance and adaptation in the face of the unknown. A popular phrase among diasporic people is “our ancestors’ wildest dreams” — a description for achievements of a people with a lineage that includes enslavement and colonization. African spiritualism lives within this phrase, and the more mystical elements of that spirituality were represented throughout the exhibition.

Earth-toned walls offered a subtle background that worked in collaboration with the onyx materials that Ogunlesi uses. Found objects lined the walls as part of his ongoing Eminado series(2018–ongoing). It was easy to imagine the sand-coloured floors as the beaches in slave castle ports, left behind in journeys of no return. Connection to ancestral spirits and gods proliferated in the gallery, represented at the entrance to the exhibition by Veve of Ogun (2024) hanging overhead. The ornate-patterned piece is the religious symbol for Ogun, the god of iron, and was forged by a Nigerian metalsmith commissioned by Ogunlesi. The artist and the metalsmith share the “Ogun” signature in their names. In Africa, it’s believed that those who share this name are descendants of the god. For diasporic people removed from African spirituality and given a white Christian Jesus in its place, to be greeted by a Black “god” was already a dream beyond our wildest imaginings.