Ayomide Tejuoso (Plantation)

Ayomide Tejuoso (Plantation) is a Nigerian-British artist based in Geneva and London. Working across photography, film, and installation art, she turns her practice into a frenzied search for Blackness by constructing visual tales of the Black experience and expression. She creates visual worlds deeply immersed in the Black sacred and profane, while exploring themes such as the Black home, Black boyhood, girlhood, death, and love. Through her work, she delves into the complexities of being a Nigerian and navigating viscous systems. Drawing inspiration from esteemed Black creative visionaries such as Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Liz Johnson Artur, and Khalil Joseph, Ayomide Tejuoso actively references their perspectives and contributes to the ongoing evolution of Black visual culture. Her artistic endeavors have garnered recognition, and her works have been exhibited in prestigious institutions across Europe and West Africa, including: PhotoVogue Festival 2021, Foam Talent 2021, Photo Vogue Voice Residency 2022, PhMuseum Women’s Grant Shortlist 2022, Getxophoto Festival Shortlist 2022, OSCAM Amsterdam, Rele Gallery, and Affinity Gallery.

Currently, she works in the fields of creative direction and literary production, coordinating a visual campaign for PhotoVogue Festival and writing for TWIST Magazine, New Currency Magazine, and PhotoVogue. She is invested in visual culture and its iterations. She examines how to re-contextualize a brand through creative practice and across the digital and physical spheres. Her writing is grounded in research and she uses language to further her passion for architecture, Black revolutionary thought, and contemporary art.

 

 

These three photographs and the film Blue Heaven are part of the project My Sin Is Blue (2021 – 2022)

My Sin is Blue is a scattered reflection of my desperate longing for Nigeria. Stuck in France, alone in the West, I slowly began to lose my mind. Faced with relentless anti-Blackness, unable to react, I found joy in deconstructing the image of Blackness and listening to the words of Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, and Deana Lawson. I would spend hours watching Arthur Jafa speaking about the Black church as an outstanding visual plane and the urgency of creating compilations of the Black disposition – Black visual culture (from pop culture, Nollywood, to Instagram compilations, and Black music). I became obsessed with Deana Lawson’s search for the sacred and the profane in her images, with each pose and element telling a tale of the Black spirit – diasporic by force (the transatlantic slave trade and modern-day migration caused by proxy wars) and relentless for survival.

I would photograph every single Black person I saw in France and Britain. I went to their homes and created visual worlds with their forms. Trying to understand the image of Blackness – my Black image – I would create installations, video stills, and image transfer pieces, also attempting to replicate my diasporic and ever-changing nature.

Blue Dust is part of the project Pink Bullets. Black Blood (2023)

Visual modulations of the frenzied passage of time, of hyper-produced imagery forgotten and lost in the broken artifacts (phones) from the 21^st century technology boom, of our hyper-awareness of impending doom, of Black boys in transit, of Black women in power, and of everything, everywhere, all at once. Pink Bullets. Black Blood is a testimony to rest and time, my bleeding wounds, and my notes on death. With slow shutter speed and gritty images of Black men and women performing with the pink AK47 across the fields, streets, and homes of Geneva, the post-produced archival images of my family (taken in the 2000s with my parents’ BlackBerry phones), and stills capturing the quietness of life, this body of work is a tale of the diasporic Black existence. Of our entanglement with death (police brutality and the weight of colonial violence represented by the pink AK47). Of our forgotten memories lost in the digital overproductions. Visual modulations of home, tenderness, and love hidden within folders of folders, apps of apps, private Twitter accounts, and the two-step verification Snapchat Archives. Untouched when dead, locked in digital clouds. Nothing is ever ours. Again, this body of work is a tale – a tale of love and rest, of the stillness of time captured only when the moon blinks, when the sun burps, and when the ocean swallows. Finally, this body of work weaves a tale of my reflections on Black life, rest, and death – all of which relate to my experiences as a Nigerian, as well as to the Nigerian collective struggle. Our hyper-awareness of impermanence, our performance of hyper-perfection, our frenzied walks and jumps (living in a relentlessly manufactured neo-colonial capitalist world), our forgotten loves and words, and our spirit lines. Spirit lines so bright, spirit lines so pure, death like light, God like blue. We are of the earth, the moon, and the sun, pure everlasting light. Spirit lines, come rest in your mother’s arms.