Ahead of a new Barbican show, the visual artist discusses being a ‘weird, creative type’ and why moving to Alabama made her question everything Toyin Ojih Odutola was born in Ife, Nigeria, in 1985. She moved to the US aged five, first to Berkeley, California, then to Huntsville, Alabama, where her father worked as a professor and her mother as a nurse. Odutola is renowned for her intricate portraits drawn with ink, pastel and charcoal. Zadie Smith called her “one of the most exciting young artists working today”, and has written an introduction to Odutola’s new Barbican show, _A Countervailing Theory__._ Your new show imagines an ancient civilisation in central Nigeria where women rule over an underclass of black male humanoids. How did this idea come to you? It came from two separate incidents: one was reading an article about rock formations in central Nigeria, which indicated that some ancient civilisation had arranged them in such a way; the second was from an episode of the BBC podcast _A History of the World in 100 Objects_ on the Ife head. A German archaeologist discovered the [centuries-old brass statue] in 1910 and couldn’t conceive of Nigerians having the mental aptitude to create such anatomically correct and beautiful objects, so he decided that Greeks from Atlantis had made it. I started asking, who has a right to create their own stories? I wanted to create a work of art that, visually, stood apart from occidental picture-making, that felt very “other”. Continue reading...
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