Daisy Finch speaks to Bolanle Tajudeen about curation, ritual and the ethics of nurturing emerging talent.
Bolanle Tajudeen’s curatorial eye stretches beyond her professional work with Bolanle Contemporary and Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture. The director is just as discerning about the people she draws into her orbit, from influential figures across art, design and culture to the artists she now presents.
The founder has hosted a course of lectures on Art in the Age of Black Girl Magic at Tate and is preparing for an upcoming course on Lubaina Himid, led by Ese Onojeruo, curator of the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Bolanle is quick to note those who inspired her early in her career, from curator Zoé Whitley and educator Luisa-Maria MacCormack to designer Duro Olowu and Bolanle’s own mentee, Tolu Elusade.
As Bolanle Contemporary’s Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo opens her booth at Frieze London, Bolanle touches on the tactile nature of the artist’s work, finding a working ritual of her own and her ever-evolving ambitions for Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture.
Could you talk me through Eilen’s work and how it fits into the mission of Bolanle Contemporary as a whole?
It’s interesting you asked that because I was looking at all of the artists i’ve worked with through Bolanle Contemporary and thinking, ‘What is the one thing that really ties all of their work together?’ I think it’s the ritual of making. They’re all very considerate in how they make their work, the materials they choose and the processes they return to. Spirituality is present across a lot of the practices, but for me it’s also about ritual in a much broader sense: repetition, process, material and the act of making itself.
With Eilen, I’m particularly interested in the way she moves between figuration and abstraction, and increasingly what happens when she pushes further into abstraction. Even when the figure isn’t immediately present, there’s still a sense of the body in the work. There are gestures, forms and recurring motifs that feel connected to memory, spirituality and lived experience without necessarily illustrating those things directly. She has this real visual language that she’s built for herself. Flowers, clouds, rainbows, hearts and other forms appear and reappear, but they can become fragmented, enlarged or absorbed into the abstraction. There’s something quite instinctive about the paintings, but at the same time they’re very deliberate. I think that tension is really interesting: the work can feel incredibly free, but there’s a structure and a language underneath it.
Materiality is also really important to her practice. She works across hessian, canvas, handmade paper, charcoal, clay, soil and wood, and you really feel the hand of the artist in the work. That physical relationship to making is something I’m very drawn to. And that connects to what I’m trying to build with Bolanle Contemporary. I’m interested in artists for whom making isn’t simply a means of arriving at an image or an object. The process itself carries meaning.
For example, the other artists I work with have very different practices, but that ritual of making is present throughout. Osman Yousefzada works across textiles and textile-making processes, drawing on South Asian indigenous practices and the material culture of women in the community. Djofray Makumbu physically makes claymation figures and constructs entire sets for his films. Their work looks completely different from Eilen’s, but there’s a shared consideration of material, process, memory and the ritual of making. I think that’s one of the threads that is becoming increasingly clear within the gallery programme.
How does it feel to see the artists you represent receive the positive recognition they have?
I’ve never been wrong about an artist. When I first started working in the arts, I was working with artists like Rene Matić, Silvia Rosi and Ṣọlá Olúlòde, who have all gone on to have incredible careers. There’s something really affirming about seeing that happen, because often you’re seeing something in the work very early on, before there’s necessarily the wider recognition around it.
The artists I work with now are at a different stage. Most of them already come with a certain level of recognition and a strong sense of who they are as artists. So it becomes less about me discovering somebody and more about what happens when we bring our networks, our visibility, our ideas and our belief in the work together. How do we amplify what’s already there and create opportunities for the work to move into new spaces?
What excites me is continuing to work with artists who I think will be giants within their generation and their peer groups. I’m interested in longevity. I want to look back in 10, 20, 30 years and know that these are artists who have made a real contribution to art and culture. And it’s not only about their individual practices. The artists I work with are deeply invested in community and have a social practice in some form, which is something I recognise in myself too. There’s always a wider question underneath the work: ‘What do we want to see for our respective communities, and how can the work we’re doing contribute to that?’ For me, that’s as important as the recognition.
Would you say ritual is a big part of your own life?
I think ritual is a big part of my life, particularly in the spiritual sense. I have to feel spiritually attuned to an artist. But before we get into star signs and all the cuteness of it, there has to be a really solid foundation. Working with an artist is a professional relationship and there’s a huge amount of trust involved. They’re trusting me with their work and their careers, and I take that responsibility very seriously.
For me, good business practice and good ethics are part of caring for artists. Artists are at the centre of the art world, so I’m very conscious of what it means when somebody chooses to work with me and allows me to become part of their career.
Once that foundation is there, then it becomes, ‘How do we vibe? What is the language between us? What rituals do we develop together?’ Every relationship is different. I’ve been working with artists for over 10 years, through Black Blossoms, different curatorial, programming and producing roles, and now Bolanle Contemporary. One thing I’ve learnt is that my role isn’t to impose myself onto an artist’s practice. It’s to understand what is already there and work out how I can help them push it further.
That’s where the alchemy comes in for me. There has to be something intuitive in the relationship. I want to alchemise with an artist, to bring their ideas, my ideas and the conversations we’re having together and create something that neither of us would necessarily have arrived at alone. Whatever we’re doing, I want us to push it until it feels ambitious, considered and completely true to the artist.
Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture is doing incredible work in art history education. How do you hope your artists’ successes feed back into the art world at large, what has historically been quite a privileged space?
I think there’s privilege in the art world, but there’s also gatekeeping, and the two exist in equal measure. Black Blossoms really came out of my own experience of entering the art world and realising how much I hadn’t been taught. There were artists, writers and entire histories that I encountered later and thought, ‘Why didn’t I know about this before?’
So rather than waiting for somebody else to create that space, I built what I wanted to see. Black Blossoms started as a platform highlighting Black women and non-binary artists and eventually became a school where people could encounter artists, histories and movements that have often been neglected within Western art history.
For me, the school and the gallery are connected. When an artist I work with enters a museum collection or receives a major opportunity, of course I’m incredibly proud. But I’m also thinking about the person taking a Black Blossoms course who sees that and understands that this work belongs within art history too.
I’m not particularly interested in asking for permission to enter spaces that have historically excluded us. I’m much more interested in building things. If we can create the knowledge, networks and opportunities ourselves, while also working with institutions and challenging what they present, then the art world becomes much bigger and much more interesting.
There’s so many layers to the school’s mission. How did you build Black Blossoms with artists and art criticism cohabiting one platform?
I love art criticism and I love art history. I just love learning. For me, if you want a rigorous art world where Black and Brown artists aren’t peripheral but are at the centre, you can’t only have exhibitions. You need criticism, writing, education and conversations around the work too. That can come from established institutions, but it can also come from grassroots spaces and communities creating that knowledge for themselves.
I grew up in Ladbroke Grove, and that’s important to how I think about all of this. I grew up around so much Black and Brown creativity. There was fashion, music, Carnival, entrepreneurship and people creating things around me. So my understanding of culture didn’t begin when I entered an art institution. The institutions gave me another language for thinking about things I had already grown up around.
I’ve also been lucky to have really great examples of Black creative entrepreneurship. I remember asking Duro Olowu, ‘What do I actually need to do to have a career in this world?’ And he told me that education and creative criticism were really important. That stayed with me.
Later, when I was teaching Art in the Age of Black Girl Magic at Tate and then started delivering sessions online, I began thinking seriously about what remains after an exhibition ends. You can have this incredible exhibition, but then what? Education, criticism and writing allow people to keep returning to the ideas and give the work another life. That’s really how those things came to cohabit within Black Blossoms.
And there’s still so much more I want Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture to become. The dream is publications, more seminars, reading days and spaces for serious critical thinking. I want us to contribute not only to which artists are seen, but to how art is thought about, written about and ultimately remembered.
