Absent Mothers and Colonised Bodies (OLUKEMI LIJADU)

Guest artist OLUKEMI LIJADU joins curator and PHD researcher PELUMI ODUBANJO  to discuss her multi-media art practice through the prism of 'The Stranger' (aka 'The Outsider' aka 'The Foreigner') by Nobel Prize winning writer Albert Camus. Published in 1942, the novella tells of an indifferent French settler who, soon after his mother's funeral, commits the senseless murder of an unnamed Arab man on a Algerian beach. Heralded in the west as a classic text which explores the absurd, their exchange questions the mono-critique which underlies this status, through their personal and uniquely individual experiences. For Olukemi, this is being Nigerian born and raised, where she was educated in the British system, going on to study philosophy at Stanford, USA. While Pelumi is British with Nigerian heritage.

 

Olukemi and Pelumi's discussion also encompasses psychoanalysis, philosophy, elusive racism, European critique, American critique, contradictory affection, self knowledge, segregated Algeria, compilation of memory, disregard for women, disregard for black people, anonymous Arab characters, ancestors speaking in the first person, the presence of absent women, who can make claims of objectivity, who can make claims of the absurd, women fading from the novel as male desire for them fades, the assumption that one must divorce one's positionality from how they engage with work for their opinion to be valid, the black woman as photographer and therefore narrator, as well as the radicalised and colonised body. 

 

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OLUKEMI LIJADU

olukemilijadu.com

insta @kemlij

contact@kemkemstudio.com

'Guardian Angel' commissioned by ICA 2022

ARTISTS + EXHIBITIONS 

Atong Atem

Kahlil Joseph 'BLKNWS' 2018 ongoing

Theaster Gates

Wura-Natasha Ogunji

'A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography' at Tate Modern til 14 Jan 2024

'Genetic Automata' by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong at Wellcome Collection til 11 Feb 2024

BOOKS + AUTHORS + FILM

Frantz Fanon

Fred Moten 'Black and Blur' 2017

Harper Lee 'To Kill a Mockingbird' 1960

James Baldwin 'The Fire Next Time' 1963

Jane Austen 'Pride and Prejudice' 1813

Lola Olufemi

Paul Gilroy 'The Black Atlantic' 1993

Saidiya Hartman 'Lose Your Mother' 2006

Saint Omer 2022 director Alice Diop

Timothy Ogene 'Seesaw' 2021

Toni Morrison

MUSICIANS

Aretha Franklin

Bob Marley

Christopher Williams

Frankie Knuckles

Lee Scratch Perry

Rokia Traoré

Whitney Houston

GALLERIES + INSTITUTIONS

Sanford University

Institute of Contemporary Art

Tate Modern

V.O Curations