Abraham Oghobase: Life of Mine explores mining legacies across Africa, to July 30

Nigerian-born Toronto-based artist looks at the impacts of the colonial practice through visual montages

By Gail johnson

Abraham Oghobase, Untitled 1, 2023 (left); Schematic 1 06A, 2023.

The Polygon Gallery presents Abraham Oghobase: Life of Mine to July 30

NIGERIAN-BORN TORONTO-based artist Abraham Onoriode Oghobase digs deep into the legacies of mining across Africa—as well the resulting human displacement and migrations—in a new exhibition now running at The Polygon Gallery.

Life of Mine explores resource extraction and how it has driven colonial agendas all around the world, disrupting long-standing relationships to land, labour, and the body.

To create his visual montages, Oghobase pulls from schematic diagrams of metal-refining processes from A Text-book of Rand Metallurgical Practice, a handbook published in 1912 that heavily informed early extractive industries in South Africa and elsewhere. He presenting the drawings outside of their original context and super-imposes them onto images of his own body, In doing so, he studies the mechanisms of colonial exploitation while visually disassembling them.

The exhibition also features pictures sourced from the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, an archive spanning the period from 1860 to 1960 based at Northwestern University. Oghobase degrades these found photographs through repeated photocopying.

Abraham O. Oghobase. Copyright © 2023 Abraham O. Oghobase.

In Oghobase’s hands, the camera, the photocopier, and the scanner do not reproduce images but instead are used to deteriorate them, safeguarding depictions of nature and people from further exploitation.

“Oghobase refutes the economic and colonial incentives used to justify intensive resource extraction, proposing new (mis)uses of technology that are subversive, imaginative, and liberatory,” according to a release. “Oghobase considers how imagery of landscapes has often been used to advertise or sell land for exploitation.”

One of seven artists featured in this year’s New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Oghobase holds a master’s of fine arts in visual arts from Toronto’s York University.  Across his photography-based practice, he engages with issues around knowledge production, land, colonial history and representation by deconstructing traditional modes of making and by experimenting with the narrative and material potential of images and objects.

More information is at The Polygon. 

---

Related Articles