Temitayo Ogunbiyi

Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s art explores the relationship between the environment, line, and representation. Moving between drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, her work responds to and forges dialogues between global current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Systems that capture, mediate, and direct the movement of people and matter is a recurring subject of investigation in her practice. In 2018, she built her first functional playground, appropriating construction materials and conventional household items into a composition of non-prescriptive stimuli. The artist has since made 10 functional playgrounds.

Ogunbiyi is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including a Graham Foundation grant (2022) a Henrike Grohs Award finalist grant (2022), a Digital Earth Fellowship (2020-21), a Smithsonian Artist in Research Fellowship (2018), a Ford Foundation Fellowship (2014), and a Foundation of Contemporary Art Emergency Grant (2011, 2022).

Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Harewood Biennial (2024), Middelheim Museum (2024), DeSingel (2024), Bundeskunsthalle (2024) the 4th Lagos Biennial (2024), Museum Tinguely (2023), the Ljubljana Biennial(2023), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands) (2022), Para Site Contemporary Art Center (Hong Kong) (2022), the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022, the Madre Museum (Naples, Italy) (2021), 3rd Lagos Biennial (2019), the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (2011), the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (Brooklyn, NYC), the Dom Umenia (Bratislava, Slovakia), the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2019, a curatorial publication for the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), Hacking Conflict: Biennale Jogja XIII (2015), the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (2013), the Fries Museum in Berlin (2011), Perm Art Museum (2010), the Boomerang Biennale for work on paper and video (2010), the Caribbean Cultural Centre (NYC) (2010) and the Berlin Art Projects.

She has delivered public talks at the Guest Artists Space Foundation, Lagos, Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African Art, the University of Virginia, Yaba College of Technology, and Edna Manley School of Visual Art; as has served as a visiting critic at Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has also written texts about contemporary art, focusing on work created by African artists, which have been featured in publications that include THISDAY Newspaper, ARISE Magazine, and The Art of Nigerian Women. She has also penned three secondary school books on visual art instruction, in line with the curriculum issued by the Federal Government of Nigeria.

She has concluded a Digital Earth Fellowship where she conducted research towards developing her first play experience using virtual space. It will respond to pervasive infrastructures of online surveillance, and the inequity built therein. Her publication, Position the Proverbial, presents proverbs in conversation with visual art.

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