iniva is delighted to launch this limited edition pamphlet created by Rohan Ayinde to accompany the artist’s exhibition Dancing In The Ellipsis // A Cartographer’s Black Hole.

Each pamphlet features a collection of poems which are in conversation with Rohan Ayinde’s exhibition at the Stuart Hall Library. The prose mirrors the frequency found in Ayinde’s photographic and drawn work; reflecting on questions of home, place, diaspora, freedom and blackness. At the heart of Ayinde’s poetry is a desire to “write home”, building physical spaces for readers to get lost in.

Biography

Rohan Ayinde is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Chicago. His work is centered around creating otherwise potentials (Ashon Crawley), and in so doing breaking down and simultaneously reconfiguring the ideological architectures that shape our daily and generational lives. The landscapes his work explores are formed through the lens of a black radical imagination committed to describing freedom as a horizon of possibility. They are an archive of the journey there; maps/scores under continuous construction and refusals to acquiesce to the dominant structures of thought that frame the world we live in. 

Ayinde’s work oscillates between abstract drawings, audio-visual poetry, photography, performance and sculpture, and is interested in the ways that abstraction can function as a method for thinking about black radical thought as a form, or a poetics. He talks about his work as being “in a constant negotiation with itself, trying to understand the role it plays in building the worlds it is invested in imagining.” Recently, much of his work has been shaped by a dance around the possibility opened up by the (il)logics of black holes, specifically when read in conversation with the historical and material conditions of blackness. 

Ayinde is one half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we, with friend/producer/dancer Yewande YoYo Odunubi. He received his BA in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina (CH), and his MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019). As Gallery Manager for Blanc (Chicago) he has launched an artist residency program, curated solo and group shows, and held space for emerging and established artists in Chicago. 

He was the 2021 Stuart Hall Library Artist-In-Residence, a partnership with the Stuart Hall Foundation.