Oluseye: Merindinlogun
Opening February 15, 2025
Located on Level 2, Murray Frum Gallery, #249
Admission is always FREE for AGO Members, AGO Annual Passholders & Ontarians 25 and under. Learn more.
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
Tracing Blackness through its many migrations and manifestations, the interdisciplinary artist Oluseye blends the ancestral with the contemporary and the physical with the spiritual. Inspired by merindinlogun, a Yoruba divination ritual, Oluseye presents a new installation that illustrates the spiritual, mythological, and biographical elements that have shaped his worldview and art practice.
In Yoruba culture, cowrie shells symbolize wealth and prosperity and are used by diviners to communicate with ancestors and receive guidance. Paying homage to that cultural practice and his own narratives, Oluseye presents 16 large-scale bronze cowrie shells, resting atop a hand-carved divination tray.
Lead Sponsor
Lead Sponsor
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Oluseye (b.1986, London, UK) is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Oluseye embraces Blackness as divine, fluid, and unfixed, unbound by time, space, and geographies. His practice blends the ancestral with the contemporary and the physical with the spiritual. Oluseye has exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Fransisco (2024), Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2024), Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town (2023), the Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2023), Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021), Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen’s University, Kingston (2021) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015). In 2022, his first public art commission, Black Ark, was installed in Toronto’s Ashbridge’s Bay Park, and in Fall 2024 will embark on a tour of the Maritimes with stops at the Owens Art Gallery and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. His first permanent public sculpture will be unveiled in Toronto in 2026.