CALLING THE BODY TO ATTENTION BY YEWANDE YOYO ODUNUBI (2022)
Original scores for Gestures in Black and Blue video installation and surround sound installation What I hide by my language, my body utters
Calling the Body to attention, Yewande YoYo Odunubi’s first solo exhibition, was a gesture towards (re)centring and (re)claiming the body as an embodied site of archive, communication and imaginings. Sitting on a moment of pause, it reflected on what might constitute a poetics of the body, and the role movement performs as a process and language for enlivening threads of inquiry.
Featuring moving image, sound and performance, and collaboration with music and sound artist Auclair and interdisciplinary poet Rohan Ayinde, the exhibition formed part of Yewande’s year-long Diasporic Curatorial Animateur Fellowship with ICF, during which she conducted research into our archive and exploring a series of questions that resonate with her practice between 2021 and 2022. During this process, she was concerned with what dreamings, imaginings, potentials and possibilities are opened up and actioned when the body – particularly the b/Black diasporic body – is understood beyond dualism, monolithic stereotypes, and a fixed idea of identity.
Starting from a place of attunement, Calling the Body to attention was an invitation to reflect on what it could mean for us to connect to an awareness of a full-bodied, expansive, and imaginative self that, in each moment, is weaving new ideas into space.
GESTURES IN BLACK & BLUE (2022)
Gestures in Black and Blue is an intimate movement meditation and exploration about attuning to one's neeas and desires. Re-edited for this exhibition and with a new sound score by Auclair. This video work plays with how these impulses manifest in and through the body using repetition speed, gestures and movement - in particular touch - to call attention to themselves. Bathed in blue light, the movement sequence performed bv Yewande on screen speaks to touch as means of knowledge acquisition/production, and the communicative language it holds in expressing care and self-permission. Speaking towards the Yoruba terms 'ori' ('head') and ori inu (inner head or inner person),which conceptuallv refers to an individual's consciousness in particular, their spiritual intuition and purpose - the visuals constantly overlap, reform and dance with one another on screen as if calling one's ori inu into being. The Viewer is invited into an intimate space of ritual and a journey of self-fulfilment.
WHAT I HIDE BY MY LANGUAGE MY BODY UTTERS (2022)
Contemplating what rhythms we, our bodies, are attuning to/tuning into, this audio-visual installation draws on the rhythmic function of syncopation as an action disrupting the accepted order of things.
Syncopation, polyrhythms and cross-rhythms- essential rhvthmic features in African and b/Black diasporic musical lineages - connect to bodily intuition and melodic sensibilities. Taking root from this, the harmonised assemblage of Yewande’s poetic sketches and Auclair’s sonic interventions engage with cyclical rhythms to puncture, disrupt and reverberate new ideas. Accompanying the sounds, visuals of Yewande in fluid movement against the backdrop of a post-modern building complicate the body’s presence in relation to space and time.
A dialogue between architecture, sound and movement, this piece experiments with how syncopation can allows to move off-beat to the ‘monotonous’ rhythms of our regimented worlds.
