“I came from a very Black Power situation” says Zak Ovè in conversation with Peju Oshin – Toni Kan

Photographer, filmmaker, painter and sculptor, Zak Ovè was featured artist at the Art History Festival on Friday September 20, 2024. The event which held in London at The Gallery, 70 Cowcross Sreet had a full house of over one hundred guests made up of artists, curators, the media and art enthusiasts of various stripes.

The celebrated British-Trinidadian artist who has described his works as “black power on one side and… social feminism on the other side” was interviewed by Peju Oshin, curator, Associate Director at Gagosian, Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and writer.

The evening was a fun, exciting and interactive mélange of robust conversations, animated interjections and an excursion into multiculturalism, race and the idea of colonial identities.

Ovè spoke about his fascination with masks and masquerades while riffing on his experience with the carnivalesque in both Britain and Trinidad where the festival is an exuberant celebration of culture and community.

Speaking to his influences as an artist, he noted that “I had a great influence. My father, Horace Ovè’s history and mine are bound together. His art sat at the edges where black experience confronted its suppression.”

Sir Horace Shango Ové CBE was not just a filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer. He was also a key figure in the British Black Power Movement. His films, like Pressure, signposted him as a pioneering independent film maker who provided a unique perspective on Black history and the black experience in Britain.

Expanding on the debt he owes pioneers like his father , Zak Ové told his audience that “in my practice, I try to carry my ancestors along with me. There is a sense of urgency to have them with me.”

A 1987 graduate of Film as Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s School of Art, Zak Ove worked in film and music, collaborating with bands such as Soul 2 Soul. Fascinated by the new direction of black music, he said he engaged often with the question of “how do I translate the screaming of hip hop music like Public Enemy into something static; how do you make a sculpture scream?”

He seemed to have found an answer in visually stimulating and stunning sculptural pieces and installations like Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness, an installation made up of an “army” of 40 two-metre-high graphite statues which debuted in the courtyard of  Somerset House, at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2016 and the futuristic and colourful piece “The Mothership Connection” which he exhibited at Frieze 2023.

Commenting on the significance of Zak Ové just before the question and answer session, Rita Del Curto, Art Sales Director at MTArt Agency which represents Zak Ove told thelagosreview.ng that “Ové plays with notions of identity, positing the self as complex, open and interconnected” which makes the son of a Trinidadian father and Irish mother a true representation of multicultural Britain.