Oluwatobiloba Ajayi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
November 22 – December 10, 2024
Broodthaers Society of America
520 West 143rd StreetNew York, NY 10031
Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, noon - 6:00pm and by appointment
Closed Thursday and Friday, November 28-29
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Oluwatobiloba Ajayi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the fifth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to "return the favor" of ekphrasis. In this iteration, we mirror Ajayi, a London-based visual artist and writer, with Cha, a writer and visual artist, whose work remains deeply evocative and influential.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (born 1951 in Busan, died 1982 in New York City) was and remains a renowned filmmaker, performance artist, and writer. Having moved to New York City from Berkeley and become a fixture in the downtown literary scene—publishing alongside such peers as Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, and Gary Indiana—Cha's most celebrated novel, Dictee, came out just a week before she was raped and murdered by a security guard in the Nolita building where her husband worked. Dictee remains a touchstone for any writer who appreciates the politics of refusal or the "entitlement," as novelist Min Jin Lee put it, to write difficult prose—especially when you're an immigrant writing in your second or third language.
Cha earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973, an MA in 1977, and an MFA in 1978. Five books by or about Cha will be on hand for this exhibition: Apparatus, cinematic apparatus: Selected Writings, edited by Cha (1980); Exilée and Temp Morts (1980); Clio: History (1982); Dictée (1982); and The Dream of the Audience, edited by Constance Lewallen with texts by Lawrence Rinder and Trinh T. Min-ha (2001). Do feel free to make an appointment if you would like to spend time with these books outside of normal gallery hours.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi works primarily as a printmaker taking inspiration from architecture, her peripatetic life, and the family photographs that have documented it. However, rather than reify the technical capabilities of photography or fetishize the finely editioned print, Ajayi makes monotypes that are gritty and fleeting. Given that her method doesn't allow Ajayi to see her images in the process of making them, her monotypes are not so much printed as massaged, blindly, into existence. The process is similar to pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to emit certain sounds, maybe even words, although the tongue had no role in their conception.
It's not surprising, then, that Ajayi would find her way to a manual typewriter—a Remington "Remette" to be exact—on which she types images that probe speech and writing in the same way that her monotypes probe familiarity and memory. Indeed, the tongue is a recurring protagonist in Ajayi's typewriter works, and each missive takes a different stab at getting it to behave. "Stab" is the operative word here, the metal arm that is attached to each of the typewriter's ivory keys arcing up and forcefully striking the page. These, too, are monotypes, impressed one letter at a time.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi (born 2000 in Amsterdam) is based in London. She almost perfectly divides her time between visual art, writing, and editing, having this year participated in three group shows in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, worked as deputy editor at DADA Magazine, and published reviews in frieze, The Architectural Review, and The Whitney Review of New Writing. She earned a BA in Architecture from Princeton University in 2022 and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023.
Broodthaers Society of America
520 West 143rd StreetNew York, NY 10031
Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, noon - 6:00pm and by appointment
Closed Thursday and Friday, November 28-29
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Oluwatobiloba Ajayi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the fifth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to "return the favor" of ekphrasis. In this iteration, we mirror Ajayi, a London-based visual artist and writer, with Cha, a writer and visual artist, whose work remains deeply evocative and influential.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (born 1951 in Busan, died 1982 in New York City) was and remains a renowned filmmaker, performance artist, and writer. Having moved to New York City from Berkeley and become a fixture in the downtown literary scene—publishing alongside such peers as Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, and Gary Indiana—Cha's most celebrated novel, Dictee, came out just a week before she was raped and murdered by a security guard in the Nolita building where her husband worked. Dictee remains a touchstone for any writer who appreciates the politics of refusal or the "entitlement," as novelist Min Jin Lee put it, to write difficult prose—especially when you're an immigrant writing in your second or third language.
Cha earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973, an MA in 1977, and an MFA in 1978. Five books by or about Cha will be on hand for this exhibition: Apparatus, cinematic apparatus: Selected Writings, edited by Cha (1980); Exilée and Temp Morts (1980); Clio: History (1982); Dictée (1982); and The Dream of the Audience, edited by Constance Lewallen with texts by Lawrence Rinder and Trinh T. Min-ha (2001). Do feel free to make an appointment if you would like to spend time with these books outside of normal gallery hours.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi works primarily as a printmaker taking inspiration from architecture, her peripatetic life, and the family photographs that have documented it. However, rather than reify the technical capabilities of photography or fetishize the finely editioned print, Ajayi makes monotypes that are gritty and fleeting. Given that her method doesn't allow Ajayi to see her images in the process of making them, her monotypes are not so much printed as massaged, blindly, into existence. The process is similar to pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to emit certain sounds, maybe even words, although the tongue had no role in their conception.
It's not surprising, then, that Ajayi would find her way to a manual typewriter—a Remington "Remette" to be exact—on which she types images that probe speech and writing in the same way that her monotypes probe familiarity and memory. Indeed, the tongue is a recurring protagonist in Ajayi's typewriter works, and each missive takes a different stab at getting it to behave. "Stab" is the operative word here, the metal arm that is attached to each of the typewriter's ivory keys arcing up and forcefully striking the page. These, too, are monotypes, impressed one letter at a time.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi (born 2000 in Amsterdam) is based in London. She almost perfectly divides her time between visual art, writing, and editing, having this year participated in three group shows in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, worked as deputy editor at DADA Magazine, and published reviews in frieze, The Architectural Review, and The Whitney Review of New Writing. She earned a BA in Architecture from Princeton University in 2022 and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023.