Exhibition Text: Worlds Within Fruit
Text by Rosie Penny
Orí Inú | Aisha Seriki | Doyle Wham | 23 May - 27 July
A calabash, also known as a bottle gourd, is a large round fruit that grows on trees. For over ten thousand years people have utilised calabashes as bowls, rafts and instruments. It is a domesticated plant that relies on humans for survival: we are codependent, co-existent, entwined in a symbiosis. Its closest wild relative grows in Africa, before new world lineages carried the plant across to East Asia and Central America.
To prepare the fruit, the hard exterior shell must be cut in half to access the soft inner flesh. The sound of the saw is hollow and scratchy with little resistance. Once open, the flesh can be spooned out by hand. When the walls of the shell are cleaned you are left with two bowls. Two vessels fit for many purposes and ready for use.
The function is birthed from the taking away of the middle. The removal of the physical core makes way for something other. A container for the universe. In Ìṣẹ̀ṣe (Yorùbá Spiritual Tradition) the halved calabash is used as an analogy to visualise the cosmic system. The bottom half, Ayé, is the visible realm of the living and the top half, Ọ̀run, the invisible spiritual realm of the ancestors, deities and spirits. Whilst divided, the upper and lower hemispheres fit tightly together. This is a holistic system not a divided one. There is no hard distinction between the halves when inside the hollowed fruit, the two realms make up one space. It conceives of a universe populated by multiple competing forces which intersect the two realms, creating crossroads. By tending to these symbols, Seriki intends to mend the break between her mind and spirit.
It is the calabash, hollowed and dried that Haddi holds in the Orí Inú series. Her destiny and her crossroads rest in the palms of her hands. Orí, literally translated, means head - specifically the physical human head. The head is often used as a symbol of an individual’s essential nature in Ìṣẹ̀ṣe. Orí is one's personal ‘god’ which follows us through the ups and downs of life. With the extension of Inú, Orí-Inú becomes the inner head, distinct from the physical outer head. The inner head, the Orí-Inú, rules the human destiny of the individual based on their personality and the way it guides their behaviours. It is believed that before birth, in the spiritual realm Ọ̀run, you choose your head and from that point onwards the course of your worldly existence.
Perhaps these stills were taken, if allowed to fantasise, in this otherworldly realm. The featureless setting a backdrop for the internal and introspective places we inhabit. The existence of self before a physical form in Ìṣẹ̀ṣe subverts the Cartesian understanding of the self as a dual mind/body. Temitope Adefarakan names this re-conceptualisation of the self as the fusion of mind, body and spirit. Seriki emphasises the presence of the spiritual self in her photographic portraiture. Forming a visual language for embodied consciousness which often escapes the spoken word.
Linguistic gaps are telling of cultural histories. In Christian theology there is the term Via Negativa, a latin phrase for the study of what is not. It was originally used to describe the Christian god by focusing on what he isn’t. The point being that if this monotheistic god were to transcend all things, humans cannot apply qualities and attributes to him in the affirmative. Instead an indirect definition is made from subtraction, what a god cannot be. My problem with this idea of god, and in an expanded sense spirituality, is that what it describes is less than whole. It boils faith and the feeling of other worlds down to an unknowable source, a detached and narrow vision of what controls us. In comparison Seriki’s photography is encompassing and humanising, outlining the spiritual realm as known and not othered. Knowledge based on experience not theory.
Yorùbá feminist scholar Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí challenges the term worldview - ‘used in the West to sum up the cultural logic of a society, [it] captures the West’s privileging of the visual. It is Eurocentric to use it to describe cultures that may privilege other senses. The term “world-sense” is a more inclusive way of describing the conception of the world by different cultural groups.’ When describing a world, or a god, or gods, or worlds, it is easy to fixate on what can be seen. Seriki disrupts this European hegemony by incorporating trick shots and optical tactics from the 19th century into her practice. She uses mirrors to create a photo-multigraph which produces the image of Haddi five times in one photo. When I first saw Orí-Inú 2 I had assumed there was a group of people holding hands in a circle, now I see they are all reflections. If you can’t be sure of what is real, you must depend on other senses to locate yourself.
It is Seriki’s understanding of photography as multi-sensory which defines her work concerning the Orí-Inú. The text you are reading doubles up as a poster. If you turn this paper over in your hands you will be met with an image - a photograph you are having a haptic experience with. Haptic refers to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch. How does the image feel in your hands? How does the weight of the image make you feel? This is as important as the work itself. Like the two halves of the calabash everything is interrelated. Seriki builds a crossroad between her art and her audience, a path that can be travelled both ways. There is no authority but two interacting forces.
Seriki’s integration of spatial elements to her practice builds on her refusal to conceive of photography as solely visual. She embeds her photography into a series of bronze comb sculptures (Ìyarun), a metaphor informed by African diasporic histories where the comb surpasses its functionality to become a cultural symbol of empowerment, ritual and self-care. In her recent work she has also experimented with making stereographs, a composition of two pictures mounted next to each other looked at through a set of lenses called a stereoscope. The two images are taken around 7 cm apart to correspond to the spacing of the eyes, so that when looking through the stereoscopic viewer the pair of photographs converge into a single three-dimensional image. These techniques harnessed by Seriki indicate a gesture of care towards her audience. You are involved in the final process, you are a part of the work. There is an undeniable warmth in her practice, the photos pulse with her spirit.
