Gabriel Gbadamosi

Date Added:
[June 22, 2012]
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Gabriel is an Irish-Nigerian Londoner, a writer and broadcaster. His radio play The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 won the Richard Imison Award; his recently completed novel Vauxhall won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize at the London Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University.  His essay on the African male nude was recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

This provocation kicked off the day’s proceedings with energy and intrigue and superstition. We passed conch shells between us. The sun was shining and Gabriel’s voice filled us and the space with tales of West African oracles and divination. This system is on UNESCO’s list of ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’.

 

 

IFÁ ORACLE

I   I

I  I

I  I

I  I

Eji Ogbe (Ogbe Meji)

They took palm oil and poured it into the room

And Ant came out;

They took fire and heated the walls

And Cockroach came out.

Orisha said, “That is what happened.

“Orunmila, you took all my slaves and hid them.”


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Object abuse asks the question:
who or what is being abused?

Object Abuse has been set up to provide a platform for people to discuss, provoke and question the very nature and orientation of objects. The aim is to readdress the unquestioned drives of our collective pursuits, to turn the tables on the object-subject dynamic.

This investigation’s relevance is reflected in recent developments in philosophy, shifts in our socio-cultural landscape and is finding expression in the visual arts. This questioning of our human-centric perspective is reflected through current ideas found in the works of Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Anselm Franke and others.

The question: what exactly is object abuse is by no means obvious, when you think about it, who is to say the object in question is passive and not active? Also it is worth asking where does the form of abuse originate from? What qualifies abuse, is it quantifiable, can we identify subtler variations? And for that matter; what is an object, or rather can we say what is not an object…with any real certainty?

OA‘s function is to invite a multidisciplinary engagement; to be a forum, a curatorial framework and an archival space.

We welcome expressions of interest and contributions to the ongoing debate.