A woman stands in an otherworldly landscape, looking out. The landscape is sublime, though not the European sublime of cliffs, peaks, and mist. Here the sublime is African. It has many texturesconglomerations of stone, waterfalls, verdant grasslandsand may remind Nigerians of their own Jos Plateau. The woman stands with her left leg raised, surveying it all, with no sense of urgency; indeed, she appears to be in a state of philosophical contemplation. She seems assured both of her mastery over this land and of her natural right to it. This sovereignty is expressed primarily by her bodythe fabrics she wears, the pose she strikes, all of which find their reflection in the land around her. The same dark lines tracing her impressive musculature render the rippling rocks; the ridges of her bald head match the ridges in the stone; the luxurious folds of the fabric are answered by the intricate layering of the earth beneath her feet. Toyin Ojih Odutolas The Ruling Class (Eshu) appears, at first glance, to be a portrait of dominion. For to rule is to believe the land is made in your image, and, moreover, that everyone within it submits to you. Structurally, it recalls Caspar David Friedrichs depiction of Enlightenment dominion, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog: the same raised left leg, the same contemplation of power in tranquillity, the echoes of hair, pose, and fabric in the textured landscape. But the red-headed man with the cane and his back to us has been replaced by a black woman with a staff, facing forward. The script has been flipped.

The show containing this image is called A Countervailing Theory. Countervail: to offset the effect of something by countering it with something of equal force. The word could not be more apposite. We are in a cultural moment of radical countervailing, perhaps as potent as that experienced in the sixties, when what was offered as counter to the power of the gun, for example, was a daisy placed in its barrel. A period of hierarchical reversal, or replacement, of this for that. And The Ruling Class might seem wholly part of this countervailing movement, oppositional and constructed of opposites: black replacing white, by way of a restricted black-and-white palette of charcoal, chalk, and pastel. A picture that offers a new image of power as counter to an old one.

But thats not the whole story. And Ojih Odutolawho was born in 1985, in Ife, Nigeriais an unusually story-driven visual artist. Her 2017 breakout show, at the Whitney Museum, To Wander Determined, with its depiction of two imagined Nigerian dynasties united in marriage, involved world-building equal to that of any novel, and in A Countervailing Theory the story, as the title implies, is not merely a flipped script but also a theory concerning countervailing itself. The forty pictures in the show are hung on a curving wall at the Barbican, in London, and unfold sequentially, like a Chinese scroll. Together, they lead us deep into the wilderness of our present ideas about powerwho should have it, how it should be wieldedand then out again, a journey as much philosophical as visual. What are the possibilities and the limits of countervailing, as a political or an aesthetic project? Is it sufficient merely to counter? Or might a higher synthesis be conceivable?

The project started, according to Ojih Odutola, with a wandering charcoal line, which she followed, rather blindly, letting my mark making guide me... to see what aesthetic characteristics and proclivities recur and how to incorporate these as motifs in the work. (Though Ojih Odutolas images are often mistaken for painting, she has so far worked exclusively in pen, pencil, charcoal, and pastel.) Following this line, she arrived at an unexpected destination, framed as a question. What would it look like if women were the only imperialists in known histories across the globe? Which led to another: If the powerful women she was drawing were the masters, over whom did they have mastery? The story developed:

My initial aim was to tell a tale of two beings, one born, another made/manufactured, who exist within a system that enterprises and stratifies war, imperialism and hierarchiesand how these two mitigate their respective lives within it to, ultimately, cross over and come together to bring the whole system down. But they fail.

The two beings are Akanke, who is a member of the Eshuthe ruling class of womenand Aldo, one of the Koba, male humanoids manufactured to work for the Eshu, mining and cultivating food. The Koba far outnumber the Eshujust as slave populations usually dwarf their overseersbut, like slaves, their lives are not their own and they live in fear that their masters will decommission them at any time, for any reason. The first eight pictures give us an idea of what it is to be Aldo. Like all Koba, seams run through his body, etched into the skin, through a process implemented, as another image, This Is How You Were Made; Final Stages, suggests, by the Eshu. And, as is true for all beings, Aldos own existence seems to be a puzzlement to him, although perhaps, as an oppressed being, he puzzles over it more intensely than the ruling class, who, in their tranquillity, tend to think only of their own power. In Introductions: Early Embodiment (Koba), this existential anxiety is expressed through the depiction of hard-to-parse liminal spaces, for Koba seem to come into being in a zone somewhere between the bardo, the depths of a mine, and a penal colonyamid circles, lines, waves, and shadows, where it is difficult to say what is floor or ceiling, ground or sky. In this strange, transitional place, Koba avert their eyes; they seem fearful; each grips his own naked body, which appears to be his only possession.

The contrast with what we glimpse, in Unsupervised Education, of Eshu childhood is striking. Young girls, future rulers, roam their environment freely, evidently curious, touching and examining the land, even breaking off pieces of it, at ease within their surroundings and never doubting that ease. When Ojih Odutola was asked about some of her sources of inspiration for Eshu society, she offered a line of Camille PagliasSociety is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to natureand also the geometric costumery of the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen. It is easy to see, in the imperious Eshu, the ways in which this feared vulnerability is systemically disguised and obscured, by staffs and helmets, by bodies trained to show no sign of weakness or potential decay, and by clothing that, like van Herpens, mimics the patterns of nature and aspires to natures authority of form.

See the article here:

Toyin Ojih Odutolas Visions of Power - The New Yorker