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Intro

The publication Olorisa investigates the complex relations of art and spirituality in terms of cross-cultural contexts by revisiting the revitalization of the sacred grove of the Yoruba Orisa (deity) Osun, located in Osogbo, Western Nigeria. The four contemporary artists involved—Rahima Gambo, Eva Maria Ocherbauer (initiator of the project), Adeola Olagunju, and Roberta Stein—revisit the Osun grove to investigate how Susanne Wenger in collaboration with Osogbo artists and craftsmen achieved a synthesis of sacred architecture, Yoruba religious iconography, and modernist forms. The preservation and transformation of the Osun grove is the ultimate culmination of holistic creativity that used modern art to pursue spiritual transcendence. Olorisa is a contemporary search for a similar spiritual synthesis, this time between the collaborative protocols Wenger and the Osogbo community used to rebuild and renovate the Osun grove, and those of the four artists involved. They explored Osun’s grove and documented traces of the historical work, while also developing personal artistic approaches to contemporary photography, video, and sound—inspired by its spiritual essence. Osun is associated with fertility, prosperity, and healing. Their interrogation of the sacred grove’s unique symbiosis of Yoruba and European aesthetics is in essence a spiritual pilgrimage, a search for Osun’s benevolence, for creative fertility, and for spiritual healing in our tumultuous times. Olorisa thus heralds the return of the sacred in modernist narratives that have for too long effaced how the search for spiritual transcendence gave birth to modernism in its divergent expressions.

Eva Maria Ocherbauer (Ed.): Olorisa.
With contributions by Rahima Gambo, Eva Maria Ocherbauer, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Adeola Olagunju, Roberta Stein, Susanne Wenger (eng.)
FotoFactory.Lagos, Graz/Berlin/Lagos, 2021.
108 pages, 20 × 30 cm, numerous b/w and color illustrations.
€ 42.– / ISBN: 978-3-200-07660-0

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