Artist, Abraham Oghobase: My name is Abraham OnoriodeOghobase. You are looking at my installation, Constructed Realities.
I conceived the work because of a book that I encountered titled, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa by Frederick Lugard, who was the first Governor General of Nigeria between 1914 to 1919. It covers a lot of topics, including labor, taxes, education, the law, and the court of justice. But when you think about the book, it wasn’t written for me, or for the colonized. It was written for the colonizer.
What you’ll see are collages of pages from the book and archival images from publications that speaks to colonial history of Nigeria and the African continent. One of the strategies that I’ve employed is to use portraiture and these portraits have been made to be out of focus, to be very soft, but then the texts are not softened.
Number Two is the image of Ọba Ọvonramwen, the king of Benin Kingdom, on his way to exile in 1897. He was humiliated. You could see the leg chains, you could see the security guards. Image Number Eight, you’ll find the same image of Ọba Ọvonramwen within a structure. I’ve scaled it down to the point that you can’t even see the leg chains. It’s really about how one begins to think about power and shifting it, and also redefining the images themselves.
I think about ways in which I can expand on knowledge systems. You think about these images as something you can sample beyond how they've been represented within the book itself. I cut things up, scan them, digitally crop them. It’s about dismantling this hierarchy and the ways in which the stories have been told before.