Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola

Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola (born January 21, 1993) is a transdisciplinary artist born in Lagos, Nigeria. Aderemi-Ibitola’s artwork is a medley of mediums, primarily focusing on digital, performance, and interactive art. Her work is rooted in the explorations of themes of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity. She explores these themes through an intersectional lens, meaning she is concerned with the way that the themes connect and inform each other.

Early Life and Education

Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, but lived in the U.S. for the latter half of her childhood before returning to Lagos in 2014. While in the United States, she studied communication arts at New York University for her bachelor’s degree, and then moved on to study performance studies for her master’s at Tisch School of the Performing Arts.

Styles

Transdisciplinarity

Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola’s artwork is transdisciplinary, meaning it is not restricted to one form, medium, or field. Her pieces take multiple forms, primarily video, digital, and performance art. Her the topics and concepts she addresses and engages with in her artwork is not limited to the humanities and involve sciences as well. Much like her intersectional lens for engaging with race, gender, ethnicity, and identity, her methods and ideas also intersect, and her artwork cannot be categorized into one field.

Her artworks often involve multiple layers, meaning that it contains many moving parts that make use of the landscapes and different objects and visual prompts, take time to view and consider, and generally involve some form of interaction or experience for the viewer. For example, Aderemi-Ibitola’s piece ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNANA! Trace Hall XXX (2016) was set in a nightclub and made use of the whole area, with videos projected on the walls and afro-centric music causing vibrations that the viewers could feel as well as hear.

New Media

Aderemi-Ibitola is praised as a new media artist, which she and others see as a transformative medium that “can be used as a catalyst for social change.” Aderemi-Ibitola’s artwork is generally seen as new media art, as it involves a matrix of mediums and aspects in its installations. New media art, especially in the case of Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola’s work, usually has multiple components like visual, digital, performance, sculpture and more in just one piece/installation.

Performance

Performance is one of the most important aspects of Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola’s work. She studied performance arts in her master’s degree and claims the medium as one of her primary and most integral methods, especially because of the way performance intertwines and embodies with the themes she engages with. Particularly in her pieces that concern Blackness, performance is a pivotal aspect, calling attention to the embodied nature of identity and of activism/the fight for social change.

Digital and Interactive

The majority of Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola’s work has digital art components. She uses this methodology as a way to demonstrate alternative art forms in a globalized setting that do not need to be confined to one space. Furthermore, because she lives in Lagos, she rejects the idea that artists must live in the U.S. or Europe in order to be relevant and succeed in the art world. She also uses this method as she sees it as a beneficial medium with many possibilities for emerging artists and for practicing theory.

The digital aspects of Aderemi-Ibitola’s are often the aspects that engage interactively with the viewers. For example, in her piece, Scraps from Mama’s Floor (2018) Aderemi-Ibitola uses algorithms to manipulate the video/digital artwork to response to the movements of the viewers, and in turn make them feel as if they are in Lagos, experiencing the memory Aderemi-Ibitola is recalling through her work.

Video

Aderemi-Ibitola uses video in most of her pieces and identifies this medium as one of her primary methods. In many of her pieces, videos are projected onto the walls of the exhibit and add an aspect of movement to her art. One such example is in the piece entitled ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNANA! Trace Hall XXX (2016), where Aderemi-Ibitola projected dancing videos which represented “her reinterpretation of Black stereotypes.”

Time-based art

Aderemi-Ibitola is a time-based artist, which means her work uses video and performance to create a work of art that plays out in front of the viewers and is unique to each new installation that is made for the piece. Aderemi-Ibitola uses this medium as a way to create a life-altering experience for each person who interacts with her art. She has noted that her art form, however transformative, is difficult to preserve and recreate, but that that is an important challenge that provokes further thought into the themes she explores in her pieces.

Themes

Race, Ethnicity and Gender

The themes of race, ethnicity and gender are seen across all Aderemi-Ibitola’s pieces. She draws from her Nigerian heritage and the culture of Lagos, where she lives, informs her work. In the piece Scraps from Mama’s Floor (2018), she uses footage from around Lagos as the foundational and thematic background for the piece, which is meant to express memories from her childhood in Lagos, where she lived until age 10. This piece is also a good example of intersections of race, ethnicity and gender in Aderemi-Ibitola’s work, as it also engages with women in a Nigerian context.

Aderemi-Ibitola’s work is grounded in anti-oppression and activism, because of the themes she engages with and the effect she hopes to create. Her artwork is meant to get the viewer to think critically about the themes she is presenting. Her work also centres Blackness, focusing on perceptions, symbolisms, stereotypes and realities of Black existence. She aims to use her artwork as an accessible means for people to engage with anti-oppression.

Science

Aderemi-Ibitola plays with themes of science in her works, as a promotion of transdisciplinarity, and melding together of the arts and sciences. Her piece Black Bodies – Event Horizon (2020), uses physics, specifically the concept of dark matter as symbolism, for example.

Major Works and Residency

Scraps from Mama’s Floor (2018)

Scraps from Mama’s Floor (2018) is a digital and video art piece. The piece involves videos of Lagos, with the principal theme being the artists childhood memories of her mother making dresses for herself and her sibling. The piece uses live motion detection technology, which meant that the viewers movements were also incorporated into the piece, which was meant to echo the unique process of dressmaking employed by her mother. This piece was her first solo show. She won the Art X Prize (Art X Lagos) for this piece.

ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNANA! Trace Hall XXX (2016)

ABRASAX MANDINGO PUNANA! Trace Hall XXX is a piece that combined music, video, digital art and location in its installation. It was installed in a nightclub, where Afro-centric music was provided by DJ Afrologic. The piece involved themes of Blackness and gender.

Gasworks Residency (April 1 to June 17, 2019)

At her Gasworks residency, Aderemi-Ibitola worked on a project that involved researching the Achaemenid Empire, with a particular focus on Cyrus the Great. For this project, she used material that is historically significant to the Achaemenid Empire, the stone lapis lazuli. The project used VR as a method for imagining the implications of conquest and war.

References

This article "Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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