In her special project, "Where There Is Life, There Is Hope", Temitayo Ogunbiyi uses drawing, sculpture, and installation to connect people with their environments and advocate for community, care, and movement in Lagos.
Line might be understood as a marker of time, distance, duration, or gesture. For Temitayo Ogunbiyi, it is a recurring motif; yet, her expansive practice, as both a multidisciplinary artist and curator, begins to unravel the rigidity suggested by the form.
In Ogunbiyi's use of line-often in large-scale interactive playgrounds-geographies are traversed, time suspended, and she offers her audience participatory spaces to engage their bodies. Her use of lines also extends across mediums, reaching towards the poetics of language, the healing potential of botanical cultures, and the cultural knowledge expressed in hairstyles.
The plurality of Ogunbiyi's works ask us to imagine otherwise: to go beyond any perceived boundaries and consider the world anew, to better understand our place in it. Here, she discusses the overarching concerns of her work and her evolving understanding of the relationship between histories of migration and ecology.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi: Your practice has long engaged with the motif of the line as a way to connect disparate geographies and social histories. How did you arrive at this foundational form, and how has your use of it evolved over the course of your seventeen-year career?
Temitayo Ogunbiyi: I'm very interested in what it means to create community and leverage transient communities. All communities are actually transient, and shape the ways in which we can communicate and interpret our everyday lives. This focal point in my practice very much comes from my American, Jamaican, and Nigerian upbringing and the heritages associated with each.
Throughout my life and research, I have continually navigated connections between places, which are most simply expressed as lines. In further imagining communities - those of my ancestry and those in close proximity to my past exhibition venue - I highlight plants described as native or indigenous to specific areas to interrogate and expand narratives of plants and people. I believe line is a critical attribute of all that is seen or experienced. My understanding of line continues to evolve through specific references to culinary tools, cartography, the movement of people, data, plants-and sustainable exhibition practices that draw connections between moments in time and generations.
OA: Your work often spans drawing, sculpture, and installations. How do you approach materials, and what guides your decision-making when translating a line into a physical form?
TO: This question is huge! And my response to it is still evolving, so I will just speak about my works on paper and painting. I have used acrylic, pencil, and ink to render edible botanicals while simultaneously interpreting hair textures and hairstyles. The two references aim to express the intimacy between plants and that people, and the related acts that can connect people. I often reference hairstyling techniques that are popular in West Africa, such as braiding, threading, cornrows, cane rows, and weaving and work on herbarium paper, a medium that I consider to be representative of Western knowledge. In merging the two, I seek to build a conversation concerning botanical knowledge that is connected to bespoke experiences, indigenous cultures and more widely accepted narratives.
For the tenth edition of ART X Lagos, Ogunbiyi builds on her critical engagement with questions of place. Her special project, “Where There is Life, There is Hope” responds to the distinct urbanity of Lagos, where the artist is based. Inspired by the affirmative nature of Nigerian prayer, the series considers how spaces must be collectively built as much as they are systemically organised.
Like all others, Lagos is a city constantly remade in the shifting image of its people. Ogunbiyi's project reminds us that we exist in a rhizomatic community, interconnected with all living things with whom we share space. Her work encourages us to tune into wider registers of care. In retracing the lines that connect us all, we can better advocate for the environments we believe we deserve.