‘If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.’
Toni Morrison, Beloved
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 6
Tala is proud to present Marked, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Lola Ayisha Ogbara. Excavating the exhibition space’s latent potential as a site of rememory, Ogbara constructs an immersive environment of haunting and collective remembering. Through ceramic sculpture, sound, and scent, she engages the philosophical poetics of the scar as both a visual language of fugitivity and an imprint of resistance.
Drawing from the 19th-century folktale Tar Baby, as told in the Uncle Remus stories, Ogbara considers the tale as an allegory for the history of Black survival through subversive wit, where cunning and flight become strategies of endurance. Reflecting on these tactics of evasion as a dual narrative of movement and displacement, Ogbara’s newest body of work, 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. As if leaving a trail of footsteps through the gallery, Ogbara creates her own semiotic map-making language to lead viewers through her own personal history while speculating a path forward.
Marked begins at the end. Upon entering the gallery, one is immediately met by the exhibition’s most prominent installation: a collection of her wrought Forget Me Knot sculptures laid upon a bed of black sand, subtly impressed, almost suggesting the forms had gently rolled themselves into their final resting place. Playing on loop in the exhibition are two soundscapes: Half Notes Scattered, composed by the artist, and Reminisce, by Two Halves, the artist’s sound duo with partner Andres L. Hernandez. Permeated by an atmosphere of evocation, the soundscapes drift between ambient vocal samples, fragmented songs, and bucolic naturescapes at the speed of a half-remembered dream. Ogbara’s installation of black sand emulates both a landscape and a specific place - drawing from the visual language of 18th-century African American cemeteries, she connects her work to the tradition of grave adornments, a practice of selecting a myriad of objects to reflect a soul’s time on earth or serve as protective amulets for safe passage, acting as both marker and headstone. Through this veneration, it is believed the spirit remains a living being and a haunting becomes the willful escape from death itself, an exacting elusion through the dissolving edge between time and space.
At the threshold of this fictive final resting place, one imagines the Forget Me Knot sculptures as these offerings. This collection continues Ogbara’s exploration of the visual anatomies of keloids, irregular fibrous tissue formed at the site of a wound, rooted in the African practice of decorative scarification, a technique of cutting the skin and guiding its healing to produce raised, patterned forms. These anthropomorphic impressions evoke the shapes of kola nuts or seeds and hold cultural, industrial, bodily, and ancestral significance, serving as a metaphor symbolizing growth, grief, trauma, and the cyclical nature of healing. Each Forget Me Knot is not a literal representation of these bodily forms, but rather a vessel of their haptic contours. Loosely inspired by the cultural framework of “memory jugs,” a vessel adorned with beloved items of a deceased, Ogbara invents her own form of memoriam marked by traces of the scar itself, honoring its insistence to be remembered across all temporalities.
Accompanying the exhibition is a set of fragrances and candles by Amanda Harth. Grounded in scent’s powerful ability to heal and (re)member, Harth’s olfactory compositions are inspired by the histories of three once-thriving Black communities—now lost or submerged: Seneca Village, beneath Central Park (NY); Oscarville, now Lake Lanier (GA); and Kowaliga, now Lake Martin (AL). Drawing from the native flora and key industries that once sustained these places, Harth’s scents honor their legacies by immersing visitors in sensory portraits of each community at its height. Complementing these is a fourth fragrance, created specifically for the exhibition, designed to evoke a sense of grounding and support the making of new memories.
