Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects features the sculptural vessels of ceramic artist Dame Magdalene Odundo. Her first exhibition in Canada and the largest-ever presentation of her work in North America, the show brings together works spanning the artist’s career, including new pieces directly from her studio. On view through April 21, 2024, the exhibition is co-curated by Odundo and Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
The exhibition foregrounds Magdalene Odundo’s masterful, reverent vessels while cultivating conversations around the role of museums, cultural hierarchy, colonialism, and the potential for generative cultural exchange.
Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum
Since the early 1980s, Odundo has pursued a singular vision centered on the refined, magisterial ceramic vessel. Made entirely by hand and finished to a smooth, lustrous sheen, these works are uniquely her own while also synthesizing traditions of ceramics and other media from multiple global cultures.
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Odundo’s sensuous vessels refer to the human body. Narrow feet, rounded bellies, elongated necks, and gentle protuberances are intended to create gesture and narrative. The artist works on a single vessel for months, slowly and rhythmically, pouring years of experimentation and technical mastery into each piece.
With the hope of exploring the connections that unite us, the exhibition presents her works in dialogue with art and artifacts from many time periods and cultures, ranging from ancient Mediterranean figurines to monumental Abstract Expressionist paintings.
Early on as a student in England, Odundo began visiting British museums, where she first encountered such works. While amassed as an assertion of colonial power and authority, Odundo engaged with these collections as an artist, woman, and potter from the Global South, finding connections between them and the world she experienced growing up in Kenya.
The exhibition design aims to invite visitors to conceptually enter Odundo’s hollow forms. Described by the artist as “the space I go to hide in,” it is intended as a site of contemplation, containing a silence needed to enable reflection on her experiences growing up in colonial Africa. While not widely read as political, we can now interpret Odundo’s practice — embodied, hybrid, and anti-colonial — as deeply engaged with questions of power, justice, and what makes us human.
For more information, visit gardinermuseum.com.
Source: Hyperallergic.com