Art Metropole

23 Jul. 2026

Reactivating the Archive 8: abisola oni on the FETISH T-shirt

Time

6:30–8:30PM

Please join us on Thursday July 23rd from 6:30–8:30PM for the next event in Art Metropole’s Reactivating the Archive series, featuring artist abisola oni. oni will respond to the FETISH T-shirt multiple by John Jack Baylin and John Dowd, marking Art Metropole’s reprint of the FETISH T-shirt as an open fundraising edition.

The FETISH T-shirt was editioned by John Jack Baylin and John Dowd for Art Metropole ca. 1975, and frequently featured in advertisements on the pages of early issues of FILE Megazine. Over the past five decades, other editions of this shirt were also created, reproduced, reinterpreted, and circulated by artists associated with Art Metropole, Image Bank, and Western Front. The design reached a moment of symbolic prominence during the seminal Hollywood Decca Dance (1974), held at the Elks Lodge in Los Angeles. The black cotton t-shirt featured the now-iconic FETISH logo across the front, and has been described as “the perfect attire to wear to a dungeon or family outing.”

The FETISH T-shirt will be reactivated through “THE FETISH FIGHTS BACK!”, a lecture-performance featuring Miss Olympia Blak, a digital persona created by abisola oni.Olympia exists as a body of data that appears on screens. As an online sex worker, she performs on sensual livestreaming platforms with a frisky, hyper-feminine, uncanny persona, and she is a curious and outspoken storyteller. Through the format of a cam show, Olympia recounts how she, like her T-shirt, became a commodifiable fetish object. In dialogue with Olympia, abisola examines the liberatory potential of play and eroticism in our cruel economic and relational world. Together, they question how desire and domination operate within contemporary sexual culture.

Content note: this performance features sexually explicit content.

Seating for this event is limited. Please register to attend here.

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Reactivating the Archive is a series of artist talks and performance lectures by artists and curators responding to works published by Art Metropole over our 50-year history. This series expands Art Metropole’s past lecture series Activating the Archive, which ran from 1989–1994.

abisola oni is a writer, curator, and performance artist living and working in Tkaronto and along the Haldimand Tract. Her research and creation practice is grounded by postcolonial and feminist methods; abisola’s recent exhibitions and essays contemplate body politics, human geography, and Black and African visual culture. Her writing on contemporary art exhibitions has been published by Public Journal (Toronto), Dancemakers Centre for Creation (Toronto), and the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery (Kitchener). abisola holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Culture and Studio Art from the University of Waterloo and a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto.

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