Special Viewing ‘Dancing In The Ellipsis // A Cartographer’s Black Hole’ Rohan Ayinde

Join us to celebrate the opening of Dancing In The Ellipsis // A Cartographer’s Black Hole, with artist Rohan Ayinde and curator in attendance. Ayinde will give a short speech about the works on display.

Refreshments will be provided.

Audience capacity in the library is limited and booking is required. In order to ensure the safety of our staff and audiences we kindly recommend that visitors follow government COVID19 guidelines. 

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.

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