'Wura-Natasha Ogunji: The Epic Crossings of an Ife Head'

Journeys figure heavily in Wura-Natasha Ogunji's world. In videos made by the Austin visual and performance artist, women journey from one edge of the frame to the other, sometimes crawling at a snail's pace across the hard land, sometimes speedily skittering a few feet above it like some erratic bumblebee. Her most recent videos imagine an Ife head – an ancient Yoruban sculpture – leaving its Nigerian home to connect with its descendants in the Americas. Ogunji has made her own journey this past year, to a place of prominence on Austin's arts scene: through the performance work one hundred black women, one hundred actions at last year's Fusebox Festival, created through a grant from the Idea Fund (see "On the Funding Front"); followed by a production of her performance work Incidents at the 22 Hotel at the Off Center in August; and a solo exhibition at Women & Their Work, opening this week. Moreover, the artist will soon make her own epic crossing: visiting Nigeria, the homeland of her father, for the first time. "So much of the cultural information I've gotten has come through the creative process and through ancestral knowledge and body knowledge and cellular memory," says Ogunji. "So it's going to be very interesting for me to be on that soil, finally." Before making that journey, however, Ogunji will need to open her show and participate in The Ancestor and the Archive, an evening of short performances with other artists whose work is informed by personal and collective histories and ancestors. Next Thursday, Jan. 20, Ogunji, Amanda Johnston, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Annelize Machado, Matt Richardson, kt shorb, and Nicole Vlado will each perform a piece that is four to eight minutes long, then join in a discussion about how they approach creating experimental works that embody both the traditional and nontraditional. Ogunji spoke with the Chronicle about the origins of some of her journeys.

Austin Chronicle: What inspired your video work?

Wura-Natasha Ogunji: In 2007, I was in a residency in Spain. I was reading a lot about these crossings from Africa to the Canary Islands and across the Strait of Gibraltar, and I felt like I had a connection to these bodies, like if not for an accident of birth, I could have been these people trying to make these crossings. I was very interested in my relationship to the land and what we leave behind spiritually and physically and the impression that a person leaves on the earth. So thinking about people crossing the waters and what belongings they could carry with them and what marks they would leave made me want to kind of become those bodies but in relationship to the land where I was staying, which was north of Barcelona in the foothills of the Montserrat Mountains. It was also a place where people fled the dictatorships, so I was interested in the relationship of my black female body to this place in Spain, also given the historical context of migration and immigration and forced migration. That really inspired the first videos.

AC: How do they connect to what people will see at Women & Their Work?

WNO: I started to think about this iconographic Ife head and this question of what would it look like if homeland longed for us and came seeking us, if there wasn't any sense of absence or void in our lives in terms of needing to return to homeland, but the fact of our existence and our lives really offered something to our ancestors – and to people who still lived in the places where we had originally come from. There's a place in Nigeria that's called Abeokuta, and it means "city under the rocks." It's a place where people fled to hide during the Atlantic slave trade. So I started to think about what if these artifacts were hiding amongst these rocks and these ancestors, and what would it look like for them, years later, to seek out their descendants in the New World and how would they make that journey? They could walk on water, or they could fly. From there, I made a series of videos trying to embody that struggle [of this being crossing the ocean] but also across this metaphoric history of trying to get somewhere and coming back and trying to get somewhere and coming back, and what would it mean to arrive or not quite arrive.

I'm very excited about sharing this body of work. In the past, I haven't been so overt about the use of family photographs, and in this work, I'm using a lot of images of my father, photographs of my father and of me. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of stories these images tell. They are me, but they also become these other beings in the works of art.

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"Wura-Natasha Ogunji: The Epic Crossings of an Ife Head" runs Jan. 13-Feb. 17, at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca. The Ancestor and the Archive will take place Thursday, Jan. 20, 7–10pm, at Women & Their Work. For more information, call 477-1064 or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org.