About
Adéọlá Ọlágúnju (b. Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, fiber and installation arts, drawing, film, and printmaking. She holds a B.Tech in Fine and Applied Arts from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, an MA in Photography Studies and Practice from Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen Germany, and an MA in Art History, Criticism, and Conservation from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ọlágúnju’s work has been widely exhibited at major international venues, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar) in Brussels, Palais de Tokyo in 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 prestigious awards, such as the Grand Prize at the 12th Bamako Biennial of African Photography, the NRW Bank Art Prize, Young Art support Amsterdam Award and the Lagos Photo Festival Award. She is a finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative in 2019 and a selected mentee at the 5th Edition of Forecast Platform (2020-2021) in Berlin Germany.
Deeply committed to artistic development and community engagement, Ọlágúnju has participated in artist residencies and led workshops and masterclasses internationally. Her work is held in public and private collections, including including Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France and Forschungszentrum Gesellschaft, Technik, und Ökologie in Afrika, University of Bayreuth Germany.
Ọlágúnju lives and works in the USA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Adéọlá Ọlágúnju’s work frequently explores the complex and dynamic processes of subjectivation; the ongoing (and perhaps lifelong) inquiry into how we become subjects, both shaped and reshaped by the forces around us. Ọlágúnju’s practice navigates the complex terrain of multiple identities, examining the pervasive, often productive, state of foreignness. She is fascinated by the internal landscape shaped by border crossings, understood not merely as geographic events but as psychological and cultural thresholds that fracture and reassemble the self. She embraces material exploration as a mode of thinking, seeing it as an active collaborator and a process through which she works through her relationship to space and to acts of world-making or being in the world. Central to her practice is the notion of transversality, which she employs as a working logic. Transversality manifests here as an active, connective tissue that bridges disparate realms of experience, opening new spaces of enunciation where political, personal, aesthetic, and transcultural ideas merge to shape emergent narratives. Her artistic output thus materializes as a series of encounters or intersections where meaning is forged in the in-between spaces, rather than settling into any single narrative.