Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose on why her role at The Showroom Gallery is 'the job of a lifetime'

The Showroom's showstopper: Elvira Dyangani Ose is the new director of the Edgware Road gallery
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd
Ben Luke2 October 2018

It's a sunny afternoon just off Edgware Road, as I walk towards The Showroom Gallery. The building is being transformed into something new. On its outside, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is making a beautiful drawing of a landscape in Serowe in Botswana, based on archival photographs. Excerpts from a text by the writer Bessie Head also appear on the mural: “to the stars” it says, repeatedly.

It’s an appropriately aspirational message because I’m here to meet The Showroom’s new director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and hear about her plans for this small but punch-packing gallery. Phatsimo Sunstrum’s work is part of Women on Aeroplanes, an exhibition opening this week, which focuses on the role of women such as Head in pan-Africanism and African liberation from colonialism. It’s a collaboration with the Otolith Collective, the research-driven group that was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2010.

It’s fitting that this is Dyangani Ose’s first Showroom exhibition because she is a leading expert in African contemporary art and research into the African diaspora. But it’s also partly coincidental: she has been here only a month, so the exhibition was conceived with Emily Pethick, her predecessor, who did much to propel The Showroom to prominence and encourage both international links and a deep embeddedness in its local community.

Women on Aeroplanes links back to Dyangani Ose’s very first experience of the gallery: it includes an illuminating research project by the artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, looking at Amy Ashwood Garvey, an important figure in anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism and feminism who has been unjustifiably, yet predictably, forgotten.

It was Wolukau-Wanambwa who first brought Dyangani Ose to The Showroom in 2011, when she had just begun a job as a curator at Tate Modern, focusing on African modern and contemporary art. After three years there, she went on to curate biennials, projects for the US public art organisation Creative Time, and exhibitions for the Fondazione Prada in Milan. But directing The Showroom is “the job of a lifetime”, she tells me.

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“If you asked me what would have been the organisation that I wanted to work with, it would have been The Showroom,” she explains. Her experience at Tate “was incredible”. “I think of it like a masters, for me, in that sense — a museum studies masters… but with the effort of a PhD.” She laughs a raucous, infectious laugh that punctuates our conversation.

All that work at Tate Modern was part of the long-overdue process of transforming a largely Europe- and US-focused organisation into a genuinely international museum. Tate set up an African acquisitions committee and began buying African art in depth, as well as staging major exhibitions of African artists, such as the Ibrahim El-Salahi show Dyangani Ose co-curated in 2013. Her role there was “not only an exercise of correction or re-inscription, [it was] an exercise of challenging the framework, considering history anew”, she says.

But while the Tate may have huge international prestige, The Showroom evokes her curatorial roots in Barcelona. Her parents were from Equatorial Guinea but she was born 44 years ago in Cordoba in southern Spain and grew up in Cadiz, the Canary Islands and the Catalan capital, where she studied art history and architecture.

“I started working as a curator at college. We did shows in public spaces at the university campus, we engaged with people in neighbourhoods in Barcelona. That was my beginnings: working with artists hands-on, doing smaller projects that opened platforms for countercultural projects to be visible.”

So while the Tate was one “natural path”, she says, “on the other hand I have this longing to explore a city and what cities can signify for us in the present and the future. What makes a city, how communities engage with it, how we use it.”

It’s obviously early days, but what might we expect at The Showroom in the future? She would like even greater engagement with international institutions of a similar ilk, and to work with artists “at very key moments in their career” including those “who have international recognition and also a commercial side, but use their resources and their profiles to promote more social, more community-engaged projects, more participatory projects”, she explains.

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Despite working internationally, Dyangani Ose has been living in London since 2011 — she now lives in Forest Hill. But she admits: “I don’t know this city that well. I always used to do the same path, the same journeys, visiting the same things.” The Showroom “is an opportunity to make that investment in London”.

Having a son two years ago has also been influential. “Maybe now that I’m a mum I feel like I need to anchor myself, to settle down.” Since starting her new job she’s spent a lot of time walking around the area close to the gallery and tapping into the “communal knowledge” at The Showroom’s heart. Already, she says: “The way that I can imagine London is different, because I can see it from this perspective. And to me that’s the most exciting thing.”

Women on Aeroplanes is at The Showroom, NW8 (theshowroom.org), from tomorrow until Jan 26