NOT MY BUSINESS; a solo show by Olalekan Jeyifous | September 9 – September 30 – 2016

July 21, 2016

Coinciding with the first London Design Biennale which will be featuring a Nigerian Pavilion, 50 GOLBORNE Gallery is delighted to present “Not My Business”, a solo exhibition by Nigerian-American artist and designer Olalekan Jeyifous.

“Not My Business” is named after a poem by Nigerian poet, dramatist, and literary critic, Niyi Osundare. The title of the exhibition captures the fact that Brooklyn-based artist and designer Olalekan Jeyifous has not been back to Nigeria since he left when he was just six years old.

Trained as an architect at Cornell University, USA, Jeyifous uses Architecture and Design as tropes to investigate socio-cultural and political issues from the specific angle of his Diasporic position. The show will include black and white hand-cut card stock collages on watercolour paper, wooden models and a tapestry, in all of which Jeyifous explores the motif of the Architectural Folly. As a current Fellow of the Socrates Queens Park Fellowship Programme, the artist will actually be installing an important real Folly in the Park in Queens NYC at the end of September 2016.

Jeyifous draws on the current Nigerian news, private family photographs, and memories to conceive his Follies, referring to a Derridan ‘No longer and Not Yet Time’ in which the spectre of Modernism haunts the informal fabric of the urban landscape. Using rigorous Cubist geometric shapes, he freely juxtaposes recognisable icons of the informal economy- from street vendors, industrial waste or power generators — with those of the post-Colonial Utopia-orderly State and social infrastructure– to create strange constructions in which time and space collide ambiguously.

Olalekan Jeyifous has exhibited at venues such as MoMA, the Soap Factory, The Studio Harlem Museum (all in NYC), the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and CCCB in Barcelona. He has completed Artist’s Residencies with the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, with upcoming residencies at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology, Lisbon and the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF16), USA.