Inverted Blackness: Boluwatife Oyediran
Past exhibition
Overview
Inverted Blackness stands as the visual expression of the mutations in identity that take place within those who arrive in the United States, in the face of a culture to which they are strangers. They adapt - sometimes unconsciously - their habits, interests, and the way they eat, dress and even speak.
“How does identity and the feeling of belonging to a community take form? How does one blend in a country being an immigrant?” are just some of the questions Boluwatife Oyediran asks in his intimate portraits of black immigrants and people from Africa living in the United States, depicted in shades of blue.
Himself caught in the in-betweenness of his native culture and the will to feel at home within American society - as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design - the Nigerian painter is brought to visually translate this set of internal changes. The apparent blue bodies bathed in a luminescent halo are in reality the image of black bodies switched to their negative. This transformation, digitally operated and then reproduced onto the canvas, constitutes what Oyediran calls Inverted Blackness - the concept at the heart of his eponymous exhibition. Besides the colour inversion process, Oyediran engages with the denomination 'negative' itself, making a parallel with the stigmatisation and prejudices African immigrants face when they arrive in America.
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery triggered Oyediran's consciousness of his blackness in the global world. Identifying himself with Black Americans, he projected their fight on his own, endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement. Moving to the USA made him realise that he was not seen as a black Afro-American man but as an African, Nigerian and Yoruban. He understands that History, experiences and cultural background matter more than physical appearance in the definition of one’s identity. Inverted Blackness then emerged from the feelings of being an outsider, an alien to a community he thought he would know and could be part of. The concept appeared as a means to step away from the usual ways of depicting black skin, by using no shades of brown or black, although exploring a wide range of blues. Inverted Blackness stands as the visual expression of the mutations in identity that take place within those who arrive in the United States, in the face of a culture to which they are strangers. They adapt - sometimes unconsciously - their habits, interests, and the way they eat, dress and even speak.
Beyond their chromatic treatment, the large-scale canvases render this state of transition, introducing elements of decor specific to an Occidental lifestyle in which indoor plants and pets become a religion. Typical architectural parts, flora and Western fabrics punctuate the narration of the exhibition. They show how individuals adapt and navigate in a new environment to reach their objectives, the reasons they left in the first place. The canvas Higher Goals (After Hammons), 2024 - a self-portrait of the artist playing basketball, displays three-dimensional objects that combine American culture - the hoop - and Nigerian culture - the beaded net. A reference to David Hammons’s work - five basketball poles so high that it is impossible to throw balls in - it represents the aspirations of the immigrants, and it projects the image of America most of them grew up with: “a paradise on a distant planet. A place of shine and glitter and fast life”, as Oyediran described a few months after he arrived in the USA in a short story called Jupiter in Bad Conditions - where fiction and autobiographical details mingle in a very close dance.
Facing the canvases, the viewers can read Inverted Blackness as if they were going through Oyediran’s diary. The cerulean hues imbuing the bodies reflect an internalised process of metamorphosis, witnessing the journey of African citizens moving to the USA - in echo with the artist’s path. He proposes an aesthetic of the hybrid in the lineage of post-colonial theories.
Works
Installation Views
Publications
