Oñí Ocan

About the Exhibition

The Yoruba term oñí ocan is typically applied to initiates of Oshun, the orisha of rivers, freshwaters, sweetness, and everything that makes life worth living. Like all orisha she operates in duality: she is the divine embodiment of abundance, sensuality, fertility/pregnancy, wealth, pleasure and good fortune. She is also an orisha who has experienced grief, disappointment, abandonment, rejection, and loss. Because of this complexity, Oshun is known as a healer who works with honey and cool water to restore the body and bring mental clarity and self-awareness through the use of her mirror. She is also the patron orisha of sex workers and LGBT practitioners. Oñí Ocan is a multimedia performance ritual that focuses on the use of honey as a material and metaphysical healing modality, as well as a way to honor current and former sex workers and pleasure activists. It is composed of a five-channel experimental film as well as live performances of honey rituals.

About the Artist

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is a social anthropologist and author of To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023), which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. She is a regular contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide, an ASME-award winning magazine about place.

As an artist, her work examines the complexities of place, ecology, memory, and the constant search for “home.” Her work is concerned with understanding the ways that we inhabit place – through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory -- and how places inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that she uses her own body as a staging ground for re-membering her families’ experiences of loss, dispossession and the persistent struggle to make a place for oneself in the world. She examines these questions through the experiences of female ancestors and elders whose stories are often disappeared in family histories and official historical narratives.

Morris works primarily in the fields of photography, experimental video, installation, and performance art. She is drawn to these mediums because of the ways that they allow her to engage and play with her family's history by performatively inhabiting the stories of her childhood and imaginatively filling in the gaps where "facts" are either unknown or in dispute. Photography and video are critical tools for providing viewers with a deep sense of place and history. Alternatively, performance functions as a kind of time-traveling technology where she can revisit and restage sites of ancestral memory, interrogate the present, and imagine new kinds of social and environmental futures.

She is a national member of the AIR Gallery and alumna of The Austin Project created by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth.