31 project presents a solo show by Temitayo Ogunbiyi.

The Nigerian and American visual artist presents for the first time in France a series of graphic works. This unique work is interested in the mixture of forms by inventing unexpected fusions between Nigerian hairstyles with geometric lines and botanical elements inspired by ancient Natural History plates. Thus autonomous hybrid patterns with meticulous lines and organic lines unfold on blank paper surfaces.

Using the aesthetics of naturalist drawing from the 18th and 19th centuries, Temitayo Ogunbiyi refers to the colonial classification system of the living world and thereby questions its plural culture and its diasporic heritage. With an intimate drawing mixing ethnological and botanical references, the artist tries to make her way in a fragile balance between her personal history and the movements of History in the broad sense.

“Capillarity” is of course a nod to the use of hairstyle in her work, but it is above all the symbolic evocation of the mixture of cultures by contact, impact, propagation, assimilation … This is “phenomenon physics by which a liquid tends to ascend to propagate through a porous body ”.

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