A poetic investigation of materiality, ritual, and artistic dialogue at Tiwani Contemporary, London.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Ssssstudio, 2025. Ink on glassine, 3 panels 360 x 150cm each. Courtesy the Artist and Tiwani Contemporary. Photography Deniz Guzel.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s upcoming exhibition,’ space comma space comma space,’ embraces not-knowing, breaking habits, irreverence, and using mistakes as integral components of the creative process. Through works on paper, the artist writes a memoir of her time in the studio—through stitching, cutting, tearing, and tracing. The drawings, paintings, and collages engage in dialogue through shared marks and methods and through titles that suggest a more literal conversation between the works themselves.
With this new body of work, Ogunji employs magazine pages, gessoed tissue paper, and glassine, alongside the architectural tracing paper for which she is known. Many pieces possess an almost hyperbolic density—especially compared to her past oeuvre, where large expanses of paper often surround stitched figures. There is an irreverence for conventional material use: oil paint on tracing paper, a two-sided painting (where only one side is visible but both are important), or the combination of oil and ink forming a resist pattern of dots along the paper’s surface.
In other works, like Lagoon in Tatters, cut paper becomes fringe, creating two large openings, with the paper falling beyond its borders. In a similar drawing, those same lagoon lines become an oasis—or perhaps the large hole in the paper is the space of refuge. This dance between presence and absence recurs throughout the show, lending an almost trickster-like quality to the work, especially when considered alongside the titles. The four painting-drawings on gessoed tracing paper present a poetic riddle through their titles:
What I want
something something
same same
a thing in a thing in a thing, the mountain was mentioned, are you my mother?
The mother figure often appears in the form of the Gelede mask, part of the Yoruba ritual festival celebrating women and mothers. For Ogunji, the paper itself becomes a ritual space. The lines, gestures, marks, motion, cuts, and cutaways of thread, graphite, ink, paint, paper, and earth form an elemental language of ______________, _______________, ________________. Here, space takes on multiple meanings. It is form, emptiness, but also another ____________ entirely. The stillness of the comma; the thing around the thing you’re trying to get at; a lull, but not a lapse. Even the paper carries a polyrhythm.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer whose works include drawings, paintings, videos, and public performances. She is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and rhythms of Lagos, Nigeria, where she currently lives. Her performances explore the presence of women in public space, often investigating labour, leisure, freedom, and frivolity.
Recent exhibitions include A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern (2023–24); rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022); Diaspora at Home, Kadist Foundation, Paris (2021); and The Power of My Hands: Afrique(s) artistes femmes, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (2021). Ogunji was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal, where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has also exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, The Lagos Biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Stellenbosch Triennale, the Seattle Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Ogunji is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Dallas Museum of Art, and the Idea Fund.
Her works are held in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the International African American Museum (Charleston), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), North Dakota Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Marieluise Hessel Collection (Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College), and Kadist Foundation.
Ogunji holds a BA in Anthropology from Stanford University (1992) and an MFA in Photography from San Jose State University (1998). She resides in Lagos, where she founded the experimental art space The Treehouse.
The exhibition is on view from the 3rd of April until the 24th of May 2025. For more information, please visit Tiwani Contemporary.
