Yewande YoYo Odunubi (UK associate) is an artist, researcher and cultural producer working between movement, research and facilitation. Centring her practice around the core inquiry: “what does the body need to dream?” she is concerned with what can be enacted into space through connecting to intuitive experience and bodily rhythms. Viewing the body beyond the idea of a singular fixed form, identity or function, Yewande is interested in movement, dance, rhythm(s) and music as languages and processes of knowledge production and world-building. Her work often explores how theory and practice can be processed and actioned in the body, experimenting with dance, movement and live and filmed performance as acts of translation and a means of dialogue with the body’s present potentials and imagined possibilities.
As a UK associate at Delfina Foundation as part of Performance as Process, Yewande will continue her exploration of the ‘interior as a location of agency’ (Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture’) and, through the guide of movement, what attuning into this space offers in providing (re)new(ed) ways to think about the body/self relating to one’s desires, dreams, intuitions and reflections. Continuing to research the role rhythm, sound and music play in facilitating and opening up imagined spaces and worlds we seek to inhabit, she will further delve into concepts around freestyle and improvisation within dance and music and what they provide as frameworks for developing a methodology of attunement (or attuning into) within her practice.
Alongside poet, curator and friend Rohan Ayinde, Yewande is one-half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we formed in 2020. Her most recent exhibition and first presentation of Calling the Body to attention (2022), was presented by International Curators Forum (ICF) at Block 336. Yewande was ICF’s Diasporic Curatorial Animateur Fellow, 2021-2022, and she has had residencies with g39 and Yinka Shonibare Foundation. She was a recipient of the Jerwood Live Work Fund 2021. As a cultural producer, she has produced public programmes in art spaces and cultural organisations including 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, BLANK100, CCA Glasgow, Free Word, International Curators Forum (ICF), Now Gallery, Tate, V&A, and Wellcome Collection. Yewande is currently a Project Manager and Producer at ICF and is also a member of Black Curators Collective.
WITH SUPPORT FROM
M Art Foundation
THEMATIC PROGRAMME
Performance as Process:
Season 5
Supported by M Art Foundation
RESIDENCY SEASON
ARTIST’S WEBSITE
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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.