Ilupeju, Monilola Olayemi

Ilupeju, Monilola Olayemi (c) k.A.

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju is a Nigerian-American artist and author based in Berlin. Through painting, installation, moving image, writing, and performance, her practice confronts the insidious and generative qualities of distortion that are projected onto bodies. As she works through intimate subject matter, she also interrogates the broader political contexts from which these issues arise. She has done extensive curatorial and editorial work with SAVVY Contemporary and Archive Books, among others. “Earnestly” (Archive Books 2022) is her debut collection of writing.

Festival Content

Poets‘ Corner in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Beyond Bodies

Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda | Frankfurter Allee 14A | 10247 Berlin

 

What happens when I speak my body into space? Can I transfer it into an alternative state? Demarginalize it? Expand or dissolve its boundaries? Multiply it? Heal it? At Poets’ Corner Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in the Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda, a preoccupation with the body meets an interest in orality, performance, and transdisciplinarity. The female body, the maternal body, the Black body, the injured body become the starting points of a poetic speech that begins where language always already originates – in the body – and that attempts to open up new spaces in which it can unfold.

 

Ilupeju, Monilola Olayemi • Montsho, Goitseone • Toth, Kinga • Isasi Armengod