The Complexity of Erasure: Omogbai’s Absence

by Gladys Kalichini 

Women on Aeroplanes is a research based project curated by Anette Busch, Magda Lipska and Marie-Helen Gutberlet.  The title Woman on Aeroplanes is taken from Benard Kojo Laing’s novel Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988). The project is an exploration of stories about women that are sidelined from history. The first iteration was in 2017 at Ifa Gallery in Berlin and was themed “Filter – Editing Room”. The second, which is the event that this writing draws from, was held in Lagos, Nigeria and was themed “Search Research: Looking for Collete Omogbai”. The objective of the Lagos iteration was to bring into focus different ways of theoretically and artistically investigating women’s non-representations, absences and erasures from history. 

The conference took place over the course of five days, in three different venues. The main venue was the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Lagos. The discussions happened in the centre’s gallery, in which an oil painting on hard board titled Agony (1963) by Nigerian artist Colette Omogbai had been displayed along with pages from a magazine that documented the first gathering of the project in Berlin. Participants included artists, curators, writers and academicians who are either working on or have produced work around philosophies of the archive and the subject of women marginalised in historicized events. The presentations varied in form, others unfolded as conversations; examples include the talk by Seloua Luste Boulbina, Rahima Gambo and Maryam Kazeem. Nigerian/American artist Wura Natasha Ogunji did a performance piece, while most of the other participants presented using PowerPoint slides on their practice as artists, curators and/or writers. 

Nadine Sigert, researcher and deputy director of Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth, and Iheanyi Onwuegbucha  who is an associate curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos, presentated on the first day of the conference. This joint presentation was based on a research that aims at writing about Omogbai, a Nigerian painter who Onwuegbucha and Sigert argue is invisible within the context of Nigerian modernist paintings and art. The goal of the research is to bring into visibility her works and contributions to the development of the arts discourse and education system in Nigeria.

Sigert spoke first, and gave information about the painting Agony (1963) as being one of the only, if not the only, piece by a woman artist in the collection of modernist Nigerian paintings at Iwalewahaus. By virtue of being rare, she said the painting was special. Onwuegbucha’s contribution to the talk focused on the methods he had employed in a quest to trace and possibly locate the whereabouts of Omogbai. He explained that started his search for Omogbai by looking for information on the internet, which was not of much help because there is nothing that has been published or written about Omogbai. This represents one of the challenges of researching about artists on the African continent, which also contributes to the problem of visibility and erasure. The lack of visibility, and in turn the issue of insufficient information about Omogbai, and other women artists could be attributed to the fact women were not really been the main subject or focus of much research, at least  not up until the past couple of years. Other reasons could be attributed to the fact that a lot of information about artists in the past has not been published. The reasons could be because of colonial structures, imbedded in institutional amnesia, they could even be cultural or even personal, whatever the case, Omogbai and other women are absent from literature. She is not present in the Nigerian conversation about modern art, and is probably hardly ever heard of or mentioned in discourse about art on the African continent.

After several attempts with his google searches, coupled with some luck, Onwuegbucha eventually found something that he thought would be helpful. He came across a man who according to the source he was looking at, was Omogbai’s son. He took a closer look at the information and observed that the age of this ‘son’ was nearly the same as that herself. Nonetheless, Onwuegbucha contacted this man and they agreed to meet. When they met, Onwuegbucha was informed that this son was Omogbai’s husband.

When Omogbai returned to Nigeria from her studies, she got married  and changed her last name. This might be one of the explanations as to why Onwuegbucha could not trace her whereabouts beyond the date of her wedding. Omogbai later pursued her PhD in the United States, and eventually relocated away from Nigeria.  With the help of her husband, Onwuegbucha was able to get in touch with their daughter, who would then act as mediator in contacting Omogbai. A message would have to move from Onwuegbucha, through her daughter, and finally to Omogbai.  Owing to the time difference, information took time to reach either sides, which meant Onwuegbucha would not only have to wait to receive her responses, but the responses would also have to go through her daughter. The first responses reflected mostly Omogbai’s reluctance to respond to questions about her earlier work. On the day of his presentation, only a few hours before he spoke, Onwuegbucha received a message from Omogbai’s daughter that said, “Since I became a born again Christian, I stopped practicing traditional art.”

Omogbai expressed that she no longer wanted to be associated with anything that was perceived as ‘traditional’ or anything that would be in opposition of her spiritual path. Essentially, she voiced that she wanted her past to be erased, because she identifies her work as associated to traditional belief systems. As the image of the text was displayed on projection on the wall, I was in my seat both intrigued and conflicted on what to take from the message. Onwuegbucha had just taken us on a journey only to arrive and be sent back,  he had taken us on quest to know about Omogbai as woman painter who made such inspiring work that it was astonishing why she was never heard of her, only to be told ‘forget me’. I wondered how he felt, and especially how Sigert, who had grown somewhat attached to this painting, now thought and felt towards Omogbai’s painting. I wondered whether they felt that they had laboured to restore a narrative that wanted to be buried and remain outside the realms of history. Was it a matter in which this particular narrative did not want to be unearthed?

I acknowledge that once something is in the public domain, there is very little one can do to retract it, and in the case of art, there could be additional layers that complicate the issue even further. It could be an issue of ownership of the work that is no longer an artist’s to claim. Whichever the case, surely there has to be regard towards her agency as the artist, that of her work and even the agency of Sigert and Onwuegbucha. I end this short reflection by noting and expressing my curiosity about Omogbai beyond the painting Agony (1963), curiosity about her as an artist, and about her thoughts about her work. I recognise that she may not wish to give information, and that this is a situation in which one would have to navigate quite carefully because her present-day responses about the work she made could be influenced by her spiritual path and no longer reflect the thoughts she had when she made the work; essentially she could erase and rewrite the stories of her work. Unfortunately, the reality is that some narratives want to remain in the past, there are those that want to be erased, to not only be absent but to be literally be wiped out. This is the complexity of Omogbai’s erasure, that it is not always the case that   external forces erase some narratives, but that at times they erase themselves.

Gladys Kalichini is a PhD candidate with the NRF/DST SARChI Chair Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme headed by Prof Ruth Simbao at the Department of Fine Arts, Rhodes University, South Africa 

Last Modified: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 10:45:39 SAST