Fusion Talk: In Conversation with Artist Bunmi Ogunsiji

Bunmi Ogunsiji is a re-emerging British-Nigerian writer living in London. Exploration of Heritage and the ‘troublesome’ intersection of race, age and gender are at the heart of her creative practice.

Bunmi Ogunsiji is one of the artists that delivered artwork for These Things Matter Exhibition.

These Things Matter is a small partnership exhibition between Museum of Colour, Bodleian Libraries and Fusion Arts, featuring six objects relating to slavery and empire, and six contemporary responses created by artists.

Bunmi's artwork for These Things Matter called ''And There Was Disquiet at The God’s Table''

In Bunmi Ogunsi's work. a proud Nigerian and devout Christian encounters the Rev. Bellby Porteus, founder and president of the Society for the Conversion and Religious instruction and Education of Negro Slaves in the British West India Island (the society responsible for the Slave Bible and shares with him a few home truths regarding the inevitability of their meeting and the role of Christianity and colonialism in the construction of his neo-colonial African identity. This piece speaks

to the alchemy of endurance and is a deeply personal reflection on now a religion imposed has been reshaped and renamed by the colonised and enslaved to honour those things that simply refuse to die.

We caught up with Bunmi to find out more about her artistic practice, commissioned artwork on display, and lastly what is one word you would use to describe the TTM exhibition.

Click to watch Bunmi's interview.

My name is Bunmi Ogunsigi, I am a writer short stories, poetry scripts as well.

The work in this exhibition called '' And There Was Disquite at God's Table'' it is a video poem, it did not start off that way, it started off as a page poem but during the process it just involved into something a lot more visual, basically features or imagines at my own father who was devout Christian having a conversation with Bishop Bellby Porteus who was the president of the christian Society that produced the Slave Bible.

''They meet in heaven and my Father has a few home truths to tell the Bishop about Christianity and Colonialism''

UNSELLING! but that does not actually quite describe it, and I choose that word because it is the word that comes to my mind on this first experience of the exhibition, but I have not actually had time to absorb it. But it is UNSELLING.