About
Adéọlá Ọlágúnju is a Nigerian-born artist whose 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.
Ọlágúnju has exhibited at major 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 numerous honors, 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, and from 2020 to 2021, she was selected as a project winner and photography mentee for the fifth edition of the Forecast Platform in Berlin. Ọlágúnju has participated in artist residencies, workshops, and masterclasses globally.
Her work is held in institutional 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, peoples, and materials.
I am drawn to the tangled ground of multiple identities and to the pervasive, yet productive state of foreignness through which new modes of seeing emerge. I trace the inner landscapes shaped by border crossings, seeing them not simply as geographic events, but psychological and cultural thresholds that fracture, expand, and reassemble the Self.
My thinking draws from the Yorùbá concept of Àrè, the itinerant artist, whose departure from the familiar is essential to artistic, personal, and cultural understanding. In this terrain, foreignness shifts from a demographic identity into a generative mode of perception that approaches the unfamiliar as a fertile site of discovery. I approach material exploration as an act of thinking-with, seeing materials as tools and 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 and construct spaces where opacity, fragmentation, and uncertainty become ways of knowing.These crossings between materials, places, and ideas operate through the logic of transversality: a connective thread that allows seemingly disparate experiences, geographies, and temporalities to intersect. My works materialize as crossroads where the political and the intimate, the personal and the collective, coexist without collapsing into a single narrative. Instead, meaning is formed in the in-between spaces through movement, relation, and the ongoing work of becoming.