Ebun Sodipo: Frieze LIVE 2021

We are looking. We are searching. We are listening.

We know she will come, we know that she will arrive but when...

We thought we caught a glimpse of her in an archive somewhere.

We do not know.

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These are fragments of finding, records of being in and with the body, flash-fire encounters with ancestors. This is a seeking of more than what we have to hand.

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Using the ghostly, hypnotic and meditative capacities of reflective surfaces, Sodipo speculates on black trans desire and thirst as instinctual drives, gesturing towards and stuttering out - in song, and in movement, and in text - an embedded and embodied knowledge of a configuration of being that can now only be felt, has been lost to sensible knowing, existing only on the murky edges of consciousness; destroyed in the encounter with the West.

Ebun Sodipo is a London based artist making work for those who will come after: the black trans people of the future. Her interdisciplinary practice narrates her construction of a black trans-feminine self after slavery and colonialism. Through a process of fragmentation, collage, and fabulation, she devises softer, other-wise ways of imagining and speaking about the body, desire, archives, and the past.

Her work has been shown, read, watched, performed at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning Centre, Bernie Grants Arts Centre, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s How To Sleep Faster, Auto Italia, ICA, Tate Britain, Embassy Gallery, Wasafiri. She is currently an artist in residence at Porthmeor Studios, where she is working on commissions for VISUAL Carlow, FACT Liverpool, and CCA Glasgow. She also teaches at UAL and Falmouth University.

About LIVE 2021

This year’s LIVE programme is curated by Languid Hands, a London-based artistic and curatorial collaboration between Rabz Lansiquot, filmmaker, programmer and DJ, and Imani Robinson, interdisciplinary writer, editor and live artist.

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