Artist 325
Abraham Onoriode Oghobase
Conceptual photography and printmaking
Abraham Onoriode Oghobase (born 1979) is a Nigerian artist based in Toronto, Canada. In his artistic practice, his uses photography to interrogates human existence with the aim to uncover interior worlds through experimentation with the narrative and multisensory potential of images and objects, including archival materials.
His quest for the purpose of existence has led Oghobase to a unique form of art as he explores issues relating to human emotions and identity against specific socio-economic backdrops. As a result he often using himself as material in his performance-based work.
In recent years Oghobase has adapted a four-color separation printing technique to build hybrid compositions consisting of monochrome layers of images.
When asked on his journey to being a conceptual photographer Oghobase describes his origins in working in documentary photography and film and how his introduction to film festivals lead him, “What I became interested in was how to develop my own narrative, and search for my visual language and identity. I got a language residency in Berlin in 2007. For the first time, I turned the camera to myself and started photographing. That was the evolution, basically, of what you see today.”
He explains, “We live in a very complex universe. Africa is very complex. This complexity can’t be explored by photography alone.” It reflects why layering to key in his photographic practise.
Further how printmaking became a part of his practise, “I'm interested in lithography because it gives me the option to explore the materiality within print making and also allows for fluidity where I can just play and be vulnerable with the medium and not have everything too tight in my head. It allows for some type of magic to happen. It's also a process where I can move the lithographic materials around and create fictitious narratives.”
Todays focus is on his photographic series ‘Constructed Realities’ (2019) Oghobase uses his layering techniques to question the past.
He seeks to interrogate the assumed objectivity and authority of colonial narratives in contrast to the people and lands they colonized.
He uses his artworks to demonstrate the visual and textual representation of the ‘other’ and how this was used as a means to legitimize European colonial domination.
This is achieved through their language and how images were curated. Oghobase combines old photos with pages from Sir Frederick Lugard’s 1922 Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. He does this due to the nature of this defining text on British colonial administration.
He shows how the alternative relationships between the colonizer and colonized where used to construct a ‘reality’ . And how this ‘otherness’ in language and visual representation is used as a form of dominance, of creating false superiority, falsifying a sense of redemption, and othering colonized in turn both fetishizing and infantilizing them.
Oghobase prints his works on cotton sheeting and chiffon fabric as a way to distort ths accepted, “absolute” (Eurocentric) ways of thinking. I love how printing of fabric in a ways that can be replicated and mass produced can be seen as this propagandist colonial ‘truth’ is literally a ‘pattern’.
In both forms: as something used in material and as a pattern of behavior used across continents as a justification by Eurocentric beliefs to justify colonialism and racism around the world.
“I’m constantly looking for things that will add multiple layers, and give my ideas a robust understanding of something. The image is not enough for these layers, which is why I naturally worked with installations and objects. Almost like dabbling in anthropology, in a way. I don’t like to use these words, but it is what it is. It’s something I enjoy, because it creates a kind of aesthetics peculiar to how I work. My aim is to communicate something. I hope people are touched.” - Abraham Onoriode Oghobase
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Sources Consulted https://arttwentyone.ng/artists/29-abraham-oghobase/biography/