“Not My Business" is named after a poem by Nigerian poet, dramatist, and literary critic, Niyi Osundare. The title of the exhibition captures the fact that Brooklyn-based artist and designer Olalekan Jeyifous has not been back to Nigeria since he left when he was just six years old.
Jeyifous draws on the current Nigerian news, private family photographs, and memories to conceive his Follies, referring to a Derridan ‘No longer and Not Yet Time’ in which the spectre of Modernism haunts the informal fabric of the urban landscape. Using rigorous Cubist geometric shapes, he freely juxtaposes recognisable icons of the informal economy- from street vendors, industrial waste or power generators -- with those of the post-Colonial Utopia-orderly State and social infrastructure-- to create strange constructions in which time and space collide ambiguously.
