Exhibition Details

MARC STRAUS is pleased to present new works by Ozioma Onuzulike in his first one-person exhibition with the gallery. A ceramics artist, renowned poet, and a leading figure in the contemporary ceramic art scene in Africa, Onuzulike will present works from four series: Palm Kernel Shell Beads, Yam, Honeycomb, and Chainmail. The works directly address challenges that are not only historical and contemporary to Africa but also the world over about colonialism, migration, and global warming.
In the Palm Kernel Shell Beads series, Onuzulike reflects on the historical use of beads as items of commercial exchange for slaves in Africa by European merchants. A variety of other goods traded through the network included spices, silk, gunpowder, jewels, textiles, glass, wine, and mirror, much of which Onuzulike subtly references in the nuanced colours, textures, and formal structures of the works in the series. It will be recalled that as human cargo quickly reached a premium, beads supply dropped and its worth and production vastly increased. When the slave trade was abolished, slave merchants turned to trade in Africa’s minerals and agricultural resources, including palm oil and palm kernel. In this series, the palm kernel becomes a contemporary currency replacing slave trading beads. In production, Onuzulike uses local clays to recreate palm kernel shells into beads and inlays them with recycled glass and ash glazes.
Subsequently, he uses these new beads to weave textile structures that remind one, not of the slave trade era, but instead of Africa’s prestigious cloths like the Akwaete of the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, the Kente of Ghana, and even the Aso-Oke of the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria. Commemorated in ceramic, we are reminded of these textiles’ history in the West African weaving tradition and their political and cultural standing. With these works, Onuzulike also highlights the moment when attention was shifted to Africa’s agricultural resources and innovatively explores the aesthetics of social change.
Yams, one of the most important crops produced in Africa, are primarily cultivated in a fertile region of land known as the “yam belt,” which stretches across Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Benin. In Onuzulike’s Yam series, suggestive textures, hollows, and recycled glasses are used to enhance the visual perception of rotting, that is, how yams deteriorate or perish when they are not properly cared for on the farms and when grown in adverse climate conditions such as lack, or much, of rainfall and rising temperatures. The production process of pounding, kneading, cutting, firing, perforating, and at times, burning the yams, highlights the violence that we inflict on the earth. The work speaks to issues of climate change and also touches on migration, specifically as it relates to the declining well-being of Africa’s youth population. Metaphorically, planting oneself like a yam in a foreign land in the hope of better years ahead is also at the heart of Onuzulike’s discourse in the series.