Terrains of Memory

A solo exhibition by Ayobola Kekere-Ekun

2021 Absa L'Atelier Ambassador

Main Gallery: 06.08.26 - 17.09.26

“This work I’m creating for this show grows out of a different relationship to memory than the one that shaped my earlier practice. When I won the Absa L’Atelier Prize in 2021, the work I was making was closely tied to memory, childhood experiences, and my attempts to process the sexual traumas of my past. These new pieces do not leave those histories behind, but they approach them from a different place, one shaped by time, change, and the ongoing work of finding out what is left of me when I look at all the things that make me who I am and choose myself anyway.

In these Zak pieces, fabric and fold become a way of thinking through growth, not as a clear departure from pain, but as a more complicated process of living with what has shaped me while still becoming something outside of it. I am interested in life as a continual convergence and separation of threads or lines. Memories, grief, desire, fear, identity, longing, and self-invention. In my experience, none of these things move in a straight line. They constantly gather, loosen, knot, return, and shift in relation to one another.

The folds in the work become a kind of terrain, a landscape of pressure, repetition, and response. They hold the traces of what has been attempted, carried, reshaped, resisted, and released. In that sense, the work I’m creating is not about resolution so much as accumulation. It is in honour of the ways my life has formed through repeated negotiations between what has happened to me, what I long for, and what I am still trying to make possible.”

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