Abraham Onoriode Oghobase

Anatomy of Landscape – Jos, 2018 (selections)

7 prints, 24” x 42” (each)

Metallurgical Practice: Landscape, 2019 (selections)

6 black and white digital prints, 24” x 34” (each)

Metallurgical Practice: Miners, 2019 (selections)

1 black and white digital print, 24” x 34”; 1 window vinyl

Anatomy of Landscape – Jos captures Oghobase’s trip to the Jos Plateau in Central Nigeria in pursuit of residual evidence of British colonial tin mining activities in the region. This investigation entailed surveying ‘mining ponds’ resembling pristine lakes, depleted landscapes, and rock formations. It  ended up taking the artist deep into a landscape where the past and present live and coexist. These images are born of the artist’s impulse to objectively document the land, while subjectively improvising to be present, to have a dialogue with the environment, and to integrate his body with the quiet vistas fraught with histories of exploitation.

Metallurgical Practice: Miners extends the artist’s investigation of Jos. Onto the images of portraits of local miners, Oghobase superimposes mining diagrams found in Rand Metallurgical Practice, two volumes of methodological diagrams published in 1912 in Johannesburg. Drawn by British colonial engineers and administrators, the metallurgical diagrams are elegant in their abstract and utilitarian logic, and contrast coldly with the haggard undulation of the river crisscrossing the indelibly scarred land. The miners become anthropomorphic extensions of the machinery that are labeled ‘tube mill cone’ and ‘pebble bucket’, inexpressive of the harmful health problems caused by daily exposure to chemical by-products in mining. Through excavating the psychological and historical strata of the landscape, Metallurgical Practice reveals the detrimental impact and enduring legacy of colonial extractivism, and the ghostly haunting of continual human exploitation on our planet.

Abraham Onoriode Oghobase (b. 1979, Lagos) lives and works in Toronto. For almost two decades, he has embraced photography as a way of exploring socio-economic, environmental, and historic geographies. Oghobase confronts issues around knowledge production, land, colonial history, and representation. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Rencontres de Bamako African Biennial of Photography (2019), the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos and Kadist, Paris (2021), MoMA, New York (2023), the Nigeria Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024), and the Toronto Biennial (2024).