Researcher-in-Residence
From left to right: Chemin du Montparnasse, © Margot Montigny/AWARE; Portrait of Oluwatobiloba Ajayi, © Oluwatobiloba Ajayi; Design by Lisa Sturacci studio, © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibition
As part of the residency program for research on women and non-binary photographers and video artists, AWARE will welcome artist and writer Oluwatobiloba Ajayi to the Villa Vassilieff, from January to April 2026.
In her research project titled Land to Light On: Black Feminist Representations of Landscape, Oluwatobiloba Ajayi will examine representations of landscape in photography and film by a number of women artists across the Black Atlantic.
For Black women, the landscape is not purely a site of freedom. Its ubiquitous presence is unavoidably linked to histories of colonial exploitation, plantation slavery, and the enforced movement of Black people across geographies. Yet despite the fact of history, the photographic and filmic motif of landscape is suggestive of liberty, exploration, and space to make sense of oneself in relation to the expanse of the natural world.
Photographers and video artists Carrie Mae Weems, Dionne Lee, and Zina Saro-Wiwa grapple with the landscape as a repository of the racial and ecological traumas endured by Black women, with the Black female body serving as an additional site of geographic knowledge. During this residency, O. Ajayi will retrace seminal works by these artists: from C. M. Weems’ series Roaming (2006) completed during her time at the American Academy in Rome to Z. Saro-Wiwa’s Table Manners (2014-16) featuring people from the Niger Delta eating. She will catalog these works and measure their conflicting connotations in resistance to the idea that Black women are excluded from geographic paradigms or falsely coupled with urbanity exclusively.
By critically engaging with this ambivalence, her research will investigate how landscape, environment, and nature act as a generative force, providing fertile grounds for the construction of Black femininity. O. Ajayi will also consider the photographic presence of Black women. How are the depicted women seeing subjects, not just objects of a viewer’s gaze? How do they resist the weight of history by insisting on moving through landscape? These questions will guide her research at the Villa Vassilieff.
The title of her project, Land to Light On: Black Feminist Representations of Landscape, is taken from the poet and novelist Dionne Brand, who expresses disillusionment with the landscape: “giving up on land to light on.” Her hope is to redress the relationship between Black women and the land by reconstructing a land for them to light on.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi is a London-based artist and writer. She holds a BA in Architecture (Princeton University) and an MA in History of Art (Courtauld Institute of Art), where she specialised in post-war Black British Art. Informed by anti-, post-, and decolonial theory, her research centres on the importance of space within Black feminist creative practices. It often returns to the question: what new critical frameworks for understanding art, architecture, and subjectivity emerge when Black women’s creativity is treated as central to the production of space? Her writing has appeared in The Architectural Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Worms, among others. Recent group exhibitions include Amphiphrasis (words as objects): Oluwatobiloba Ajayi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the Broodthaers Society of America, NY(2024), and Manifold Lagos at Alára (2024). She has recently published texts on the urgencies of Black satire, mapping as decolonial practice, and archival absence as it relates to trans histories.
This residency received the support of Fondation d’entreprise Neuflize OBC.
