Diverseworks presents Wura-Natasha Ogunji's HOUSE OF WAHALA

With a global art market valued at $63.8 billion and artists receiving the lowest amount of their earned income from the market...it's time to reinvent the art auction!

House of Wahala-meaning trouble in Nigerian pidgin-flips the script. Artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji steps in as auctioneer and sound artist Emeka Ogboh provides the evening's score. All works come from the primary market-that is directly from artists-to the audience. Featuring work from over twenty-five international and Texas-based artists, House of Wahala infuses the art auction with the perfect amount of spectacle, humor, and political debate. The art auction is finally fun again! `

Participating artists include Rabéa Ballin, Gabrielle Civil, Annette Lawrence, Rahima Gambo, Regina Agu, Adee Roberson, and ruby onyinyechi amanze, among others. Opening bids on many works begin at $100. Participating artworks/artists are subject to change.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji's artistic practice straddles the visual and performative realms. The overall concepts in her work stretch between drawing and performance in order to explore relationships between mark making and movement.

For the past several years, Ogunji has been creating multidisciplinary performance works concerning women occupying public space in Lagos, Nigeria through ordinary and epic actions. At the same time, she continues a drawing practice. Her delicate drawings on architectural tracing paper reveal images of people listening to headphones that are connected to generators underneath the earth, or plant life coming out of wires. Ogunji's brightly colored line drawings juxtapose humans and animals in environments in which agricultural life and everyday technological systems are intertwined. For Ogunji, the drawings represent a limbic world drawn from her experiences in Lagos and beyond.

Through her performance work, Ogunji engages the body in highly physical, and yet subtle, endurance movements in order to explore the body's relationship to public space. These endurance pieces have allowed her to engage with sound, movement, and direct audience participation in a new way. Many of her performances highlight the relationship between the body, social constructs, and live physical presence. In her work, Ogunji considers the critical ways in which artists create trouble by interrupting old structures and ways of being.

BIOS
Wura-Natasha Ogunji has performed at the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts, Cape Town; Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis; and the Menil Collection, Houston. Her commissioned performance, An ancestor takes a photograph, which recasts the traditional Egungun masquerade with women, is featured in the exhibition DISGUISE: Masks and Global African Art (Seattle Art Museum; Fowler; Brooklyn Art Museum). Ogunji has performed at the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts, Cape Town; Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis; and the Menil Collection, Houston. Ogunji is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2012) and has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Idea Fund. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from San Jose State University. Currently, she lives between Austin, Texas and Lagos, Nigeria.

Emeka Ogboh is a sound artist whose work contemplates broad notions of listening and hearing. Ogboh's work focuses on uses of sound in understanding and describing cities and their histories. He has performed his live soundscapes and created sound installations across the globe in cities such as Lagos, Addis Ababa and Dakar and has exhibited at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Menil Collection, Houston; MASS MoCA; and Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, Helsinki.

House of Wahala is presented in partnership with Women & Their Work and Fusebox, Austin.

House of Wahala is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Women & Their Work, DiverseWorks and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).For more information: npnweb.org

House of Wahala's presentation at DiverseWorks is supported in part by an award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations, and individuals throughout Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Additional support is provided by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

DiverseWorks Season Sponsors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, The Houston Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Wortham Foundation

In-Kind Sponsors: American Business Machines, Consequence of Innovation

Don't Miss a Houston News Story Sign up for all the news on the Winter season, discounts & more...