Funto Omojola, mother of the priest, I come to beg, 2022, Installation View, archival inkjet prints, Kanekalon hair, mother’s hair, oil, mud, and shoe. Photo: Chris Kendall
FUNTO OMOJOLA
Artist Statement
I utilize performance, photography, and site-responsive installation as throughlines for inquiries regarding illness and processes of healing. My work considers the ways that death and visioning—as understood through West African folkloric systems of belief—are contextualized in relation to Western medical understandings of the (black) body. My photographs attempt to map the disabling effects of disease while envisioning a language or theory of listening to a pillaged body. Through site-specific installations, which often combine photographs with bodily artifacts like my own hair and body debris, I trace histories of ancestral indisposition and rupture.
Funto Omojola is the 2023-2024 recipient of the Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship.