Jamiu Agboke Nigeria, b. 1989

Memories of conversations, objects and scenes emerging from both imagined dreams and tangible realities take form in Agboke’s compositions. Capturing sensations of his daily life, Agboke seeks to construct a scaffold that links how we negotiate our senses of being with our ways of perceiving the world around us.

Figures seem to shirk fixed positions; they drift, phasing through space, time and certainty, vividly engaging with their environments as equally as they cunningly elude them. Agboke’s compositions flow like a fleeting rhythmic melody, escaping any sense of permanent palpability while simultaneously committing to confidently collide into reality, albeit for brief, transient moments in time.

For Agboke, subverting mundane, day-to-day objects is a mode of revisiting. Humour is used as an avenue that can facilitate dealing with darker issues; figures and objects present more than any of their preconceived meanings or signals suggest.