February 8 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Thursday February 8, 2024
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
“Magdalene Odundo’s sublime ceramic sculptures combine the tenderness of the body as vessel with the vessel as an object that acquires animacy and intimacy in her hand.”
‒ Christina Sharpe
Presented as part of the programming for the exhibition Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects, join Christina Sharpe, renowned Writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, for a reading from her current book project. An inventory-essay, What Could a Vessel Be? is an exploration of the vessel as material and idea in a time of multiple and overlapping crises.
A Q&A will follow the presentation.
About the Speaker
Christina Sharpe
Christina Sharpe is a Writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by The Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010). Her third book, Ordinary Notes, was published in 2023 (Knopf/FSG/Daunt).Sharpe recently published “The abacus of her eyelids,” the critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand. She is working on three books: What Could a Vessel Be? (Knopf, Canada, FSG, USA, 2025), Black. Still. Life. (Duke UP, 2025), and To Have Been To the End of the World: 25 Essays on Art. Sharpe’s work has appeared in many artist catalogues and in Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, The Funambulist, Artforum, and Art in America.
About the Exhibition
Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects features the exquisite sculptural vessels one of the world’s most renowned ceramic artists, Dame Magdalene Odundo. Her first exhibition in Canada and the largest ever presentation of her work in North America, the show brings together works spanning the artist’s career, including new pieces directly from her studio. Odundo’s work will be in dialogue with art and artifacts from many time periods and cultures, ranging from ancient Mediterranean figurines to monumental Abstract Expressionist painting, to explore the connections that unite us as humans. These dialogues, and Odundo’s practice, model working trans-culturally in ways that are neither colonial nor extractive, while interrogating the role of museum collections of historical objects as well as hierarchies of Western art. Learn more