In a series of eleven portraits, Tunde Owolabi, in his first exhibition with the gallery, considers the pervasiveness of so-called informal work alongside the increasing marginalization of informal workers.
As the title suggests, Owolabi believes that the key to understanding the contradiction between apparent ubiquity on the one hand and conditional visibility on the other lies, in part at least, on what a society, and the individuals who shape it, decide is worthy of close and prolonged regard, on what it allows to linger in is line of sight, and who it allows to look back.
The people who look back in these portraits, with few alterations, are drawn from life, positioned, in the process of plying their trades, exactly as the artist met them.
These chance encounters were central to the development of the project as they offered Owolabi the chance to record both the likeness and setting of his subjects as well as an effect of compressed energy – the result of finding moments of stillness and connection in the busyness of midday Lagos. The works in ‘To Hold a Gaze’ are reminders that such encounters are not only possible, but necessary.