100 Images
20 Physical Artworks and 4 objects
2 films
To detail further, Praxis Modulus is an absurdist myth, a tale of “PLANTATION, PLANTATION” and the black bodies that survive in turbulence. It will consist of conceptual art portraits of black women with blue Sùkús sitting on white horses. Stills of Plantation with sheep on her chest and turquoise on her feet, and archives of black boys with golden crucifixes. It will be a dialogue of West African visual codes and Western Catholicism. The mixed media pieces will be canvas re-imaginations of the portraits alongside plastic found objects. The film will be a 5 minute expansion of the produced images; a rhythmic transformation of the script titled “I was born with blood on my teeth, death on my lips, and sin on my tongue” (Ayomide Tejuoso, 2024). The 5 exhibitions will be marked by a sound and performance installation made by Ayomide Tejuoso and a Yoruba folk music band. Enamored by the significance of Faaji Agba and Yusuf Olatunji the exhibitions will be immersive sonic introductions to Yoruba ontologies.
Praxis Modulus is an absurdist myth. A tale of "PLANTATION, PLANTATION" and the black bodies that survive in turbulence. It is a photography, film, installation and performance practice grounded in IFA and black dialects of grief and becoming, a creative manifesto devoted to developing West African visual codifications through Yoruba ontologies and African American aesthetic philosophies.
It engages IFA in its position of the positive and the negative. Blue is not decoration here, blue is a symbol of death and of sacredness, held at once, refusing to resolve into one or the other. Everything in this world collapses into a collection of immersive and mythical stills, into a folk tale of black beings in Europe and West Africa stuck between states of nihilism and bewilderment, hope and resistance.
There are conceptual portraits of black women with blue Sùkús sitting on white horses. Stills of Plantation with sheep resting on her chest and turquoise on her feet. Archives of black boys with golden crucifixes. Black men moving in unison, connected by long blonde hair. Black women staring at each other, holding something between them that doesn't need naming. Blue horses. Yellow hyenas. A real fable. A Black fable, deeply spiritual and, in many ways, scientific.
This is a dialogue of West African visual codes and Western Catholicism, two systems of belief and punishment and salvation pressed against each other until something else emerges. Black boys with crucifixes on their lips. Black women, bare, stained in blue, wrapped in green white flags, blackened bodies. My own naked body dipped in white, crossed with red, crowned with a Shuku, devoted to my name, PLANTATION PLANTATION. An ontology pressed against the moving image. It borrows nothing directly. It converses.
I am the central muse of this contemporary folk tale, a symbol of restlessness in modern calamity. This is a performance as much as it is a photograph. I become the character. What does it mean to paint my face blue and my tongue black and take a picture. What does it mean to shave my head, dye it blonde, and stand naked in large red feather covered heels, the editorial in dialogue with the abruptness of this naked fat body. What is my naked fat body in a colonial weather. How does it fare. How does it find love. Is she angry. Is she deluded. Who is she. How does she touch. Does she drown. Does she become.
These are my free flowing thoughts and there is a deep urgency to make images of this. My fate as a Black fat woman, and the other identities that are on this voyage with me. I want us to become codes, beings, because it is all so spiritual. It is all so blue. So, so blue.
I am interested in the Black church, in this red devotion. What does it mean to be consumed by a colonial essence. What is our search for self as the universe swallows itself whole. What does it mean to survive in this time and age, to feel lost and complex, a spiralling of with and without. I want to capture restlessness, to research it and put it to words. It is deeply cathartic.
I want to make a mapping of White Hegemonic degeneracy and its legacy on bodies, on how we love, have sex, work, and know through it. I want to understand what that means within Nigeria, and the history of wreckage and war that lingers on our lives. What does it mean, visually, to be a Black body. To be hated continentally, yet we remain. Brick by brick, we remain. What does this mean in relation to our histories and indigenous scientific affirmations. How do we use them as tools to develop a new visual language. What is the visual codification of climate catastrophe, war, and everything else in Black diasporic expression.
This project sits inside a lineage of image makers and thinkers who have tried to hold blackness as both wound and instrument, fashion photography pressed against critical theory, West African ontology pressed against the moving image. It borrows nothing directly. It converses.
Music has been a constant in this work, it is why I am an artist. I am my father's obsession with Fela as a child. I am the legacies he and his brother built. I am sound and all its complexities. There is a plan to develop a soundtrack taken from a Wèrè band in Nigeria and reworked with jazz, obsessed as I am with Sun Ra, with After the End of the World, with Don't You Know That Now. I want to rework a Wèrè band sound and make it the base of the film. I love Klein and Earl Sweatshirt and their sonic modulations, such uninhibited pieces of sound. A soundtrack that forms the foundation, not an accompaniment to the images but a body that moves alongside them.
Praxis Modulus is my creative devotion. It is a world I want to research and develop, a folk tale influenced by fashion photography, by critical black thought, by South African image making, by West African ontologies. It is not a project about survival in the abstract. It is a mapping, a codification, a fable that is also science. It is the only way I know how to ask what it means to be a Black body remaining, brick by brick, in a colonial weather. It is all so blue.