Joseph Obanubi is a visual artist from Lagos, Nigeria. He has a background in graphic design, advertising, and art education. Obanubi’s practice consists of digital and tactile experiments, constantly seeking a balance between visual and spatial design.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is constructed around three main ideologies: survival, interest, and exploration. My work explores the relationship between identity, fantasy, play, technology, and globalization. My practice is a form of visual bricolage—a (re)construction of fragments from everyday experiences, taken out of their original context and reassembled into new ones. My ideology stems from concepts of delusion, Black speculative art, Afrofuturism, and experimentation, as I am drawn to in-between states rather than directness. Recently, I have been engaging with heterotopias and utopias as spaces that allow for imagination and practical liberation. The need to engage with humor and otherness, as well as to think through the concept of “third spaces” as an overall objective (in terms of presentation), is a vital part of my current research. My goal as an artist is to offer insight into alternative ways of seeing.
My research methods include physical and digital image-making techniques, photography, drawing, collage, reading, traveling, observation, interviews, experiments, documentary practices, and film.
Some primary materials I engage with include music (Afrobeat, soul, funk, blues, jazz, experimental, hip-hop, classical), live musical performance, film, social media, African oral storytelling, and fiction.
Research questions and statements
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How do I construct alternative ways of seeing?
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How do I blur the divide between what is present and what is absent?
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What do materials communicate? How do audiences and makers engage with materials?
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What roles do time and ephemerality play in relation to (new) technologies in my work, and how do I navigate them?
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How can subjective experience be communicated to a global audience, and how do subjective ideas transcend geography?