Péjú Oshin
Talk Art
Russell Tovey and Robert Diament c/o Independent Talent
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2023
⏱️ 66 minutes
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Summary
We meet Péjú Oshin, a British-Nigerian curator, writer and lecturer born and raised in London. Her work sits at the intersection of art, style & culture with a keen interest in liminal theory and diasporic narratives. Core to her practice is working with visual artists, brands and people globally.
Since starting her career working in arts & culture in 2015, Péjú has worked broadly in engaging audiences through public programming, exhibitions, and outdoor art projects in a number of cultural spaces and institutions with a history of supporting artists at various stages of their careers. Péjú is the curator of the forthcoming Gagosain exhibition Rites of Passage which brings together nineteen artists with shared histories of migration.
Her previous work and projects include managing the delivery of the Workshop Artists in Residence programme, curating live performance Stillness: We Invoke the Black to Rest (2020), Beyond Boundaries (2021), Late at Tate Britain: Life Between Islands (2021), Late at Tate Britain: Hew Locke (2022) and in-person and online programming at Tate. Leading Barbican’s first Young Curators Group (2019-2020) and delivering a number of public-facing events at Wellcome Collection in response to exhibitions such as Living with Buildings and Being Human.
As a writer, Péjú has written texts for artists which have been used in exhibitions and solo presentations of artists internationally. She has also been commissioned to write for various platforms and published her first collection of poetry and prose Between Words & Space (2021) which explores performativity, a fear of vulnerability both in public and private spheres and relationships in their varying complexities through the nuances of culture, liminality and where we find home.
In 2021 Péjú was shortlisted for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in the Arts & Culture category and nominated and selected for one of fifteen memberships to AWITA sponsored by Martin Millers Gin, the Adara Foundation and Hauser & Wirth (2021).
Péjú currently works at @Gagosian as Associate Director (2022 - present), is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She previously worked at Tate (2018-2022) most recently as Curator: Young People’s Programmes.
Follow @PejuOshin on Instagram
Visit: www.pejuoshin.com and https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2023/rites-of-passage/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I am Russell Tovy. |
| 0:08.3 | And I'm Robert Diamond. And this is Talk Art. Welcome to Talk Art. How are you today, Robert? |
| 0:14.8 | Today, Russell, I am feeling liminal. And actually, I don't think you can really describe |
| 0:20.4 | yourself as feeling liminal, but you know me. I like to shake things up a bit of a rebel, |
| 0:25.6 | especially when it comes to words, no, not really. But basically, I am feeling like I exist |
| 0:30.7 | in a liminal space. And it's actually something I was thinking a lot about recently, because |
| 0:35.6 | in the journey through life, people, when I was growing up, I had a friend called Isabel, |
| 0:39.5 | who was almost like assisted to me. And she always used to go like, this phase that you're going |
| 0:44.0 | through is this. And then like, this phase is this. And today's guest has curated the most |
| 0:49.9 | amazing exhibition in London at Gagosi, and it's called Rights for Passage. A lot of their |
| 0:55.1 | work to this point in their career has been looking at ideas of like liminal theory as one sort |
| 1:00.9 | of thread within what they're kind of looking at. It really got me thinking about that whole |
| 1:05.6 | journey through life, kind of, you know, when you're born, there's people kind of throw an event |
| 1:10.5 | for the baby being born. And then when you reach puberty, often in different religions, you might |
| 1:15.1 | have, you know, something to mark that almost 16 or above it. Yeah, exactly. And then when you get |
| 1:20.1 | married and then when people die and there's kind of all these ceremonies and the thing that's |
| 1:24.4 | really interesting is it kind of transcends boundaries within culture. And it becomes this kind |
| 1:30.7 | of international global kind of phenomenon in a way, the way that we all mark these points in |
| 1:35.8 | our life. And I think it's such a beautiful thing to think about. And when I used to make music, |
| 1:39.6 | I used to think a lot about that point in creativity between falling asleep and waking up. And I know |
| 1:45.2 | a lot of people keep kind of like dream diaries or like, you know, trying to remember what their dreams |
| 1:49.4 | were. And I was always really interested in this idea of the subconscious and the space between |
... |
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