Spatial Poems Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Scars Insist on Being Remembered

Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Scars Insist on Being Remembered is an exercise in care that explores Black movement, veneration, and sonic experimentation, presented through imagined geographies and naturally forming archives rooted in the artistic and cultural traditions of post-structuralism in Black American and African diasporic communities. With a conceptual practice standing at the intersection of non-Western epistemologies and bodily topographies, Ogbara explores the philosophical poetics of the scar as both a visual language of fugitivity and an imprint of resistance through material and compositional investigations. Ogbara’s interdisciplinary practice is built on four cornerstones: texture, form, color, and sound. With a deep interest in materiality, Ogbara works in ceramics, metal, sound, and scent to explore shared knowledge systems and internal archives. She pays homage to and mines dual diasporic identities with cultural nods and allegories, further imbuing intimacy and symbolism into her work. Full of form and shape, the exhibition presents new ceramic works by Ogbara, as well as a commission for a MASS MoCA installation that emulates a drawing from the visual language of 18th-century African American cemeteries. This new installation offers venetration of grave adornments to serve as protective amulets for safe passage, acting as both marker and headstone. Ogbara’s Sticky series (2025) recalls the 19th-century folktale “Tar Baby,” as told in the Uncle Remus stories. It considers the tale as an allegory of Black survival through subversive wit, in which cunning and flight become strategies of endurance. Made of porcelain with glaze, enamel, black sand, and birch, Sticky invokes the legacy of Afrocartography—from the Indigenous Lukala maps of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the woven routes embedded in braids and quilts throughout the African diaspora in America. Reflecting on these tactics of evasion as a dual narrative of movement and displacement,…