Talk Rohan Ayinde Artist Talk with Sepake Angiama Rohan Ayinde

Book tickets

Rohan Ayinde is joined in conversation with curator and iniva Artistic Director Sepake Angiama to discuss Ayinde’s new exhibition and wider practice. There will be a collective listening of a call and response song created in collaboration with Ayinde and musical artist Hector Plimmer. Refreshments will be provided. 

Biographies

Rohan Ayinde is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Chicago. His work is centred 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.

Sepake Angiama is artistic director of the Institute for International Visual Arts (iniva) in London, where the Stuart Hall Library provides a rich resource for a globalised discourse on the practice of artists and curators from Indigenous, Latin American, African, Asian, Caribbean and Diaspora backgrounds. She served as co-curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and initiated under the mango tree, a self-organised gathering of decolonising and unlearning practices. She completed her studies in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, where she received the Monique Beudert Award. 

Image: Rohan Ayinde, Photograph, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.