Sola Olulode's show at VOLTA Basel 'I Love Sharing the Bed with You' by ARTPOWHER Contemporary

Thanks to ARTPOWHER Contemporary's participation at VOLTA Basel 2021, visitors had the chance to enjoy the solo show ‘I LOVE SHARING THE BED WITH YOU’ by British-Nigerian artist Sola Olulode.

Sola Olulode in her London Studio - Copyright ARTPOWHER Contemporary

This was the artists’ first exhibition in Switzerland and her first solo presentation outside of the UK. The hosting art platform, ARTPOWHER Contemporary, is a collaborative art project initiative, that places focus on female-identifying and non-binary creatives in the arts.

For her first show in Switzerland and her first solo show outside of the UK, Olulode conceived over the last few months smaller works on paper and larger paintings on canvas, experimenting with new forms of presentation.

Olulode is a London based artist who works across the medium of paint and textile influenced by Yoruba Adire textiles, an indigo-dyed fabric made in Nigeria by Yoruba women, using a variety of resist-dyeing techniques. The artist reinterprets images of majoritively Black Womxn expressed through diverse reflections of feminine energies, and inspired by her own identity as a queer Black woman.

‘I Love Sharing The Bed With You’ focuses on the beauty of the romance between Black Womxn and is imbued with loving scenes and intimate moments of rest and reflection. Like much of Olulode’s work, the paintings in the series are centred in care. Although Olulode creates works that are innately political due to the intersectionality of her own identity as a queer Black woman, it is rooted in joy. In a time where sexuality and gender-based violence are rife and the pandemic causing us to engage more with the media online; thus confronting countless images of devastating images of the Black body, Olulode’s work is critical. Born out of own her own experience, it offers a gentle insight into the queer Black (British) communities through the lens of Olulode’s reinterpretation of images that display queer Black intimacy in mainstream media. The works in this show are different to Olulode’s previous bodies of work as the focus is on the energy transferred between the subjects within the painted scenes. They are framed as extreme close-ups, which is intentional as the two bodies are presented as one loving force.

“It is uncommon to see images of Black Womxn resting in bed. I think a lot about representation in my work, and see creating these images as my small way of activism and healing in wanting to make visible images of Black people that we don’t normally see in the media" says artist Sola Olulode.

For more information and to visit the digital version of the exhibition please click here