Artist: Oluseye
Exhibition title: BLACK EXODUS: WINTER ARRIVAL
Venue: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Date: February 29 – April 6, 2024
Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present BLACK EXODUS: WINTER ARRIVAL, a solo exhibition of work by Oluseye. This is Oluseye’s first major solo exhibition in Toronto, and is a culmination of work made peripatetically over the past five years in Toronto, Grand Bassam, Lagos, Benin City and Nairobi. The opening of this exhibition follows the closing of Oluseye’s solo exhibition BLACK EXODUS: SUMMER DEPARTURE at Southern Guild Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, which was on view from November 23, 2023 to February 1, 2024.
Using diasporic debris—a term Oluseye coined to describe the artifacts and found objects he collects from his travels—he explores Blackness across themes. These transformational objects are recast into sculpture, installation, performance, and photography and their explorations invoke his lived experience within a broader examination of diasporic identity, African spiritual traditions and popular culture. Oluseye’s ongoing series of sculptures, Eminado (the Yoruba word for good luck charm), are re-imaginations of the talismans carried by Africans—past and present—on journeys across the Atlantic. Their materials include: electrical sockets, combs, bicycle pedals, rubber debris, hair, and cowrie shells. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, they serve as reminders of home, offering hope and protection at a time of uncertainty and new beginnings.
The works in this exhibition are a celebration of African ingenuity, they are homages to the skills of the artisans—hair braiders, vulcanizers, cobblers, basket weavers, and welders—from whom Oluseye learned while traveling around the continent. As with his travels, each material, method, and object exists in dialogue with a much larger story, extending beyond Oluseye as an individual into that which lies beyond his grasp: the past, the future, the mythic, and the spiritual.
Oluseye (b.1986, London, UK) is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. He has exhibited at Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town (2023); The Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2023); The Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); The Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen’s University, Kingston (2021); and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015). His first permanent public sculpture will be unveiled in Toronto in 2026.
