ROHAN AYINDE

the artist

Rohan Ayinde [He/His]  b. 1992 is an interdisciplinary artist and poet based between London and Chicago. His work traverses audio, visual and literary forms and embraces installation and performed elements. Most recently, his practice has engaged with the phenomenon of the black hole and attempts to excavate an architecture of ideology, investigating how the politics of place intersect with the conceptual - with particular focus on global ethnic majority communities. 

Ayinde is one half of i.as.in.we, a wayward/motile artistic duo formed with Yewande YoYo Odunubi in 2020. He received his MA in Visual and Critical Studies from SAIC (2019). He is the gallery manager for Blanc (Chicago), is a curatorial fellow with ACRE, and has curated shows at Blanc, ACRE Projects, and NOW Gallery.

In 2021 Rohan was selected as the Stuart Hall Library Artist-In-Residence and recent public engagements include:

  • Dancing in the Ellipsis: A Cartographers Black Hole - iniva/Stuart Hall Library 

  • The Score(s) i.as.in.we performance for “Calling The Body To Attention”  - Block336, 

  • The Score(s) i.as.in.we performance for “Of Mythic Worlds” - The Sainsbury Centre 

  • Layers of Distance: Black abstraction and imagining beyond - Chicago Architecture Biennale 

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To Echo A Song is a reference to the choral musical traditions of Africa and the diaspora communities displaced from the sites of origin of that heritage. Music, which humans perceive as organized vibrations of air particles, is suggested here as a sonic trace, waves of sound decelerating as they travel through space and time from the original source.
This delicate composition weaves together Rohan Ayinde’s attraction to the metaphysics of the black hole with ideas from the black radical tradition to create terra infirma for an artistic intervention. 


During initial discussion on how best to translate his show Dancing in the Ellipsis: a Cartographers Black Hole to flat 70, Rohan was drawn to the spatial context of the gallery and the phrase ‘the company you keep’. Existing as a meanwhile-use space in the heart of a multi-billion regeneration project, the concept of the black hole became a useful simile for the phenomenon of flat 70 and its vanishing community. The work could then be thought of as displaced on multiple registers. Displaced, in solidarity with the racialised peoples of Southwark who despite ongoing regeneration remain the largest population of African & Caribbean heritage in a single London Borough. Dislocated, as the material form of the work shifts whilst traversing spacetime and of course, displaced, via wormhole. As every sci-fi nerd knows, black holes are hypothetical topographical features making travel between two distances, even light years apart theoretically possible. Reframing the act of translation from iniva to flat 70 as a voyage through wormhole, Rohan cast’s light on the vital importance of connections between black led arts spaces, however tenuous. Homage is paid to this conceptual map through a number of texts loaned to flat 70 from the Stuart Hall Library, a longer serving institution and multifaceted research space which helped to inform both exhibitions.

Over recent months, Rohan has been photographing his contemporaries for an ongoing digital project entitled Rohan’s friends. He cites this personal archive as a set of coordinates that, on closer inspection, might allow more nuanced and complex ways of discovering a self, made from the weave of relationships to others. Six of these images have been printed at scale to highlight the unpredictability of translation and are printed using heavy inks on translucent paper to preserve an element of opacity, in reference to Glissant’s “droit a l’opacité”. The images raise the question: what happens when the immaterial becomes material? The titular song is expressed in the form of a new series of abstract drawings, continuing the process developed for the previous iteration of the work. These drawings are thought of as scores for movement, musico-visual annotation to the art of displacement. 


"For me, the drawings are scores for the freedom opened up in the process of translation. They are the possibility that inherently and paradoxically presents itself in the uncertainty that emerges when something is moved from one place to another. They are the potential of freedom that become apparent when you begin to pay attention - and understand - the context out of which and into which you are made and formed. If the photographs are one way of beginning to place myself as a relational site/cite, the drawings are the space opened up from that interrogation. They are the the the freedom of improvisation that becomes possible when you have plotted the points/coordinates within which you move. All of this is situated within the grammar of "translation," which to me is central to the concept of any diasporic history - 

Translate is an interesting word for me. Etymologically it takes us back to a combination of linked ideas -

- Borne, carried

- Across, beyond

- To bring over, carry over

In my notes I wrote:

“how can you engage with all the information you have on yourself so that you might better dance through the portal opened by your gravity?” There’s something about this which is in direct conversation with how our world is currently structured - that is that we are the product of our attention, and that we have lost control over our attention which means we are not dancing our own rhythms, instead we are dancing to rhythms we are subconsciously being fed, which are being created through our focus/lack of focus and sold back to us. Ultimately, we have to be aware in order to create. We have to dive into ourselves in order to find a way to dance all the way to the edges of our being. We have to know who and what we are in dialogie with in order to know who and what we are and how we might carve space for ourselves to be - to really be." - Rohan Ayinde

The company Rohan keeps becomes simultaneously a chorus of relational voices, a gesture towards holding space and an echo of the global family to which all displaced peoples belong. 


Rohan’s show is available to view by appointment at @_flat 70 or tony@flat70.co.uk


See Rohan’s work on Instagram

 

the work