5 October 2024 - 20 November 2024
A Quick Spin by Olu Ogunnaike is the inaugural presentation at Rathbone Institute. Ogunnaike’s solo presentation sets the institute's pace, style, and rhythm, emphasising the breadth of his artistic practice. The presentation is anchored by the restaging of Ogunnaike’s television series: Drives. Drives_E01, made in collaboration with East London Cable for Nam June Paik's retrospective and part of the Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New Perspectives at Tate Modern in 2019). This presentation provides an alternative opportunity to explore Ogunnaike’s pensive approach to filmmaking and how controlled environments become spaces of active narration. Throughout the film, an abundance of crushed blacks permeates the lens, establishing an altered relationship through illegibility to what we deem as moments of truth and honesty.Crushed blacks are areas of photographic images where detail is lost through underexposure - a former printing flaw can yield desired potentials.
As the theorist Tavia Nyongo asserts “If underexposed blacks on film are not simply devoid of content, but, to the contrary, filled with incommensurabilities, traces of a past life untranslatable into our own, might we not instead find ways of valuing those zones of indistinction for, and not in spite of, their mystery?” This series extends the potential of the crushed black, to both the soundscape and moving image. Constant yet ever in motion, Olu’s car becomes a space shared between driver and passenger, artist and interlocutor - its inhabitants and surroundings shifting registers between legibility and obscurity. Journeys become a space of conversation between that which is part-revealed; where shadows allow for complexity, intimacy and nuance to emerge, and yet, just as simply, fade away.
Olu Ogunnaike (b.1986, London, UK) lives and works in London. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Is the Soil Right?, Rose Easton, London (2024); Your Presence Is a Present (with Constantin Thun), Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2024); Fix Your Face, Spike Island, Bristol (2024); An enclosed garden, gb agency, Paris (2022); I’d Rather Stand, Museum Folkwang, Essen (2021); Crumbs, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2021); The Same Way You Came In?, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021); London Plain, Cell Project Space, London (2020). Recent group exhibitions include: Air de Repos, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (forthcoming); Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens, London (2024); Systematic Love, CAPC, Bordeaux (2023); To “the fire next time”, Villa Arson, Nice (2023); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); Domestic Drama, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Graz (2021); Reconfigured, Timothy Taylor, New York (2021)
