April 5–9, 2022
The Carlos Gallery in the Visual Art Building
The Art, Art History and Visual Studies Department at The University of the South is pleased to present Runonko, an exhibition of sculptural and painting installations by interdisciplinary artist, scholar and student Olivier Mbabazi C’22. Olivier mediates abstract and figurative paintings, wood, and metal sculptures, moving images, sound, and performance to construct a multi-dimensional experience. Drawing from personal and collective experiences as an immigrant and once a refugee, this work combines genuine emotional content to generate a path for transcending memory loss. In this exhibition, Olivier utilizes delicate structures built from ephemeral materials such as unbaked bricks, soil, bones, and remnants of dry plants as metaphors for the fragility of the passing of time. While Runonko is grounded in historical narratives, it also features performance video work that showcases slow and sacred act of building, demolishing uncanny miniatures of artificially imagined realities. Adorning the pertinence of fleeting structures, Runonko attempts to bridge fragmented memories with current realities and following delicate gestures, restraint, and spontaneity recreate lost narratives using visual clues and contradictions.
Olivier Mbabazi (b.1996 -) was born in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo to a family of Rwandan refugees. He trained in sculpture, ceramic, and music at Ecole d’Arts de Nyundo, completed a filmmaking course at IBTC Film School in Rwanda, and studied stone sculpture with Greg Davertzhofen at Kunst Gymnasium in Germany. In 2021, Mbabazi partook in a marketing management course at the University of Chicago, and in the spring of 2022, he will graduate from The University of the South with a Bachelor of Arts in Art and French and French Studies. He is a Bonner Leader, a Beckeen Scholar, a 213-A Leader, a French tutor, and a singer and songwriter and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. His works have been exhibited in Rwanda, Germany, and the United States.
