About
Adéọlá Ọlágúnju is a Nigerian-born artist whose internationally recognized practice spans photography, film and video, textiles, installation, printmaking, and drawing. Developed across Africa, Europe, and North America, her work creates material and visual encounters through which movement, memory, and foreignness continually reshape the experience of becoming.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions and festivals, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar), Brussels; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Rencontres d’Arles; Rencontres de Bamako; the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland; and Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas.
She has received many prestigious awards, including the Grand Prize at the 12th Bamako Biennial of African Photography, the NRW.BANK Art Prize, the Young Art Support Amsterdam Award, and the LagosPhoto Festival Award. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. From 2020 to 2021, she was the project winner and selected photography mentee in the fifth edition of the Forecast Platform in Berlin.
Ọlágúnju has participated in international residencies and led workshops and masterclasses internationally. Her work is held in collections including the Frac des Pays de la Loire and the University of Bayreuth. She holds a B.Tech in Fine and Applied Arts from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Nigeria), an MA in Photography Studies and Practice from Folkwang University of the Arts (Germany), and an MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ọlágúnju lives and works in the USA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice explores the complex processes of becoming: how we are continually shaped, unsettled, and remade through our encounters with places, people, materials, and histories.
I am drawn to the tangled ground of multiple identities and to the pervasive, often productive state of foreignness through which new forms of perception become possible. I am fascinated by the inner landscapes shaped by border crossings. In my work, border crossings are not simply geographic events but also psychological and cultural thresholds through which the Self may be fractured, expanded, and reassembled.
My thinking draws from the Yoruba concept of Àrè, the itinerant artist, whose departure from the familiar is essential to artistic and cultural understanding. Foreignness shifts from being understood primarily as a demographic identity and becomes a mode of perception, one that makes contradictions, partial belonging, and unfamiliar relations newly visible. I embrace material exploration as a mode of thinking, seeing materials not merely as tools but as active collaborators that carry their own histories, textures, and forms of knowledge. Through photography, textiles, installation, printmaking, film, and drawing, I translate experiences across forms, allowing one medium to reshape another. Through these translations, I construct spaces where opacity, fragmentation, and uncertainty become ways of knowing.
I understand this movement between materials, places, and ideas through the logic of transversality: a connective logic that allows seemingly disparate experiences, geographies, and temporalities to intersect. My works emerge as encounters in which the political and the intimate, the personal and the collective, coexist without collapsing into a single narrative. Instead, meaning is formed in these in-between spaces through movement, relation, and the ongoing work of becoming.