About
Adéọlá Ọlágúnju is a critically engaged multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and installation. Ọlágúnju’s work has been exhibited widely and in major venues, including Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bozar Bruxelles, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Rencontres d’Arles, Rencontres de Bamako, and Lagos Photo Festival. She is the distinguished recipient of notable awards, such as the Grand Prize at the 12th Bamako Biennial of African Photography, the NRW. Bank Art Prize and the Lagos Photo Festival Award. Committed to artistic development and community engagement, Ọlágúnju has undertaken artist residencies and has taught workshops in Kenya, Germany, and Nigeria. Her work is held in public collections, 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.
STATEMENT
As an artist, 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. Grounded in Carl Jung’s concept of the Self, Ọlágúnju examines the construction of the Self as a product of intricate interconnections involving memory, the body, spirituality, healing practices, and complex socio-political realities.
While her themes are often self-referential, Ọlágúnju increasingly presents the personal as porous, influenced by the presence and unseen forces of culture and language, and transformed through interactions with the external environment. Central to her practice is the notion of transversality, which she employs as a methodological lens. Here, transversality manifests as an active, connective tissue that opens new spaces of enunciation—where political, personal, aesthetic, and transcultural ideas merge to shape emergent narratives and possibilities. Her artistic output thus, resists settling into single narratives, instead existing as encounters or intersections where meaning emerges from the in-between spaces.