Join Nigerian-Canadian artist Oluseye Ogunlesi for a discussion and presentation of his unique multi-media oeuvre, which uses diasporic debris — a term he coined to describe the artifacts, discarded materials and found objects he collects from his travels across the Atlantic region — to explore Black being across themes. He recasts these transformational objects into sculpture, installation, performance and photography, invoking his personal narratives and travels within a broader examination of Black diasporic identities, popular culture, migration and spiritual traditions in the process.

Across his practice, Ogunlesi embraces the notion of Blackness as divine, fluid and unfixed, unbound by time, space and geographies. As such, his work bends the ancestral with the contemporary, the traditional with the modern, the physical with the spiritual, the new with the old, and the past with the future.

Born in London, England in 1986, Ogunlesi has a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University in Montreal and a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School in London. He has exhibited at the Albright-Knox Musuem in Buffalo (2022), the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021), the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston (2021) and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2015).