Sep 13 2023 70 mins 1
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
'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
