Olu Ogunnaike | London Plain

Visitor information | One Booking permits two visitors

Visitors are required to make an appointment to visit the gallery for a 30-minute slot to view the installation. Each ticket is for one visitor only. Please ring the door bell when you arrive. Each appointment adheres to government guidelines in regards to social distancing. Staff at Cell Project Space will be wearing face masks and visitors are also required to do so. Hand sanitiser will be provided. There will be a maximum of six visitors in gallery on the first floor at any given time during public hours.

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Cell Project Space presents an intervention by London-based artist Olu Ogunnaike. Staged during an interim period whilst the exhibitions programme has been postponed, Ogunnaike has been invited to consider the gallery at a time when it would have otherwise continued to be temporarily empty.

For his new commission, Ogunnaike pinpoints the exact location of the lumber from seven London Plane trees that were felled on High Street Kensington in 2012. This common hardy species abundant in the capital’s urban roadsides is often uprooted to the point of exhaustion. Speaking of the constant cycles of consumption and flux in the city, London Plain alludes to a moment when the anticipation of physical encounters in public space conflicts with a need for periods of withdrawal and pause.

Taking trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow, Ogunnaike cites wood as a marker of possible encounters; both past and present, between people and the spaces they inhabit. Interested in our composite identities, Ogunnaike presents the changing materiality of wood to expose residues of potential narrative, tracing a moment when a tree is uprooted from one geographical place to another; a story, which inextricably is linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange.

Olu Ogunnaike is currently exhibiting in ‘Memory Game’, at Villa Lontana, Rome. The first episode from his film series ‘Drives’ was presented at Tate Modern, London as part of ‘ELC TV Dinner Episode III’. Solo exhibitions include ‘Nutrition for the Next’, at Jupiter Woods, London, (2018) and Let Me Just Put My Face On, Greatorex, London (2016) with selected group exhibitions in 2018 including ‘...and their tooth, finest gold’, Les Urbaines, Espace Arlaud, Lausanne, ‘The Share of Opulence; Doubled; Fractional’, Sophie Tappenier, Vienna, ‘Le Colt est Jeune & Haine’, Doc, Paris and ‘The Way Things Run: Loose Ends Don’t Tie’, PS120, Berlin. Ogunnaike participated in the residency programme ‘Formerly Called’ at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge in 2018 and ‘The Conch’, South London Gallery in 2017.