Portals, Gateways & Hesitations | Opening Reception

Portals Gateways & Hesitations is a film interested in the potentiality of transitional and in-between spaces through the use of archival, found images and text on Igbo, Itsekiri and other traditional spiritual systems from Nigeria. Connections between the stages of life and death frame the work visually, encourage an inquisitive gaze into ritual and worship.

In The World of the Ogbanje by Chinwe Achebe, she charts the cosmology and belief systems of the Igbos of Nigeria. Achebe subverts colonial ways of thinking in her approach to understanding cultural practices. Using a spiritual lens, she attempts to treat what she considers a prevailing neuro-divergent experience in Igbo societies and the wider Nigerian culture. She emphasizes an interconnectedness with the spiritual, physical, and mental state of being, presenting an interesting point of departure in how we might rethink our experience of the world. This address of uncertainty and fluidity of reality is the position from which Portals Gateways & Hesitations departs. Achebe’s text alongside images from the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection at the Bristol Archives, and found footage visually explore these possibilities of existence and its embedded rituals.

The film explores a lineage of precarity through rituals, both visually and theoretically. It reflects on the fractured relationship that previously colonized cultures have with their traditional practices today. As the images in the film blur and warp, there is an invitation to sit with the uncertainty that the film welcomes.

BIOGRAPHY

Ogheneofegor Obuwoma (she/they) is a Nigerian artist, writer, and arts worker based in Vancouver on the unceded Coast Salish lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Obuwoma’s lens-based practice is grounded in traditions of care and reimagination. Utilizing concepts of Afro-diasporic futurism, their work emerges from an investigation of questions of the body and the spiritual as they relate to a nuanced state of contemporary Nigerian society and culture. Obuwoma’s work has been shown at galleries and film festivals, and their writing has been published on Akimbo. She graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BFA in Film and Communications and is currently pursuing an independent curatorial practice.

The Urban Screen, located on the north-east wall of the Wilson Arts Plaza, is an initiative of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program in conjunction with the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. The screen operates daily from 8am-9pm.

The Libby Leshgold Gallery respectfully acknowledges that we are located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.