June 23, 2021

Rohan Ayinde / And in time we will pretend that… (London)

And in time we will pretend that – (very softly) – you have only been away for a day (2021) by artist Rohan Ayinde (part of the iterative series, Fracturing the Horizon/A Poetics of the Black (W)hole)

This installation meditates on the (im)possibility of returning home, while attempting to produce a grammar that has the capacity to imagine new horizons for what home can be. Developed from overlapping texts of Blackness and black holes, this project takes the invitation Assegai whispers to Beneatha (Act III, Scene I) as a place to think about the atemporal friction of the African-Diasporic condition: What new landscapes might we forge through a confrontation with the impossible? What role do we play in building new structures for Black bodies to inhabit? 

What portals are we capable of creating that might bore a hole through the violent logics of this world? Is the imagination enough? 

And in time… brings the audience into the whip of these questions, asking them to reflect on the location they occupy within the landscape of black radical thought; offering a place to unbecome and reconfigure; and suggesting that the way out is in, the way home is through, the only way back is in front of us.

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installation, 2021

 

BIO:

Rohan Ayinde is an interdisciplinary poet based in London and often working in Chicago. His work is centred 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 tradition committed to imagining freedom as a horizon of possibility. For Ayinde, these landscapes are an archive of the journey there; maps under continuous construction; refusals to acquiesce to the dominant structures of thought that frame the world we live in. Oscillating between poetry, photography, video, drawings, and curatorial work, Ayinde’s work is in constant negotiation with itself, trying to understand the role it plays in building the worlds it is invested in imagining. Most recently, his work is shaped by a dance around the possibility opened up by the phenomena of black holes, specifically when read in conversation with the historical conditions of blackness.


Rohan Ayinde is one half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we, with friend/producer/dancer Yewande YoYo Odunubi. He received his MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019). He is a curatorial fellow with ACRE projects, and has curated shows at Blanc Gallery, Acre and NOW Gallery, London.

Ayinde’s work exists in many places, both fleeting and permanent.

 

 
 

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