Through her practice spanning painting, writing, performance, and installation, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju balances intimate experiences of connection, violence, and healing against broader issues of cultural distortion and identity. The paintings on cowhide leather she presents in the exhibition prompt reflection on hair braiding traditions established by women from West Africa—the care put into the act of braiding someone’s hair constituting a strong metaphor for the hospitality that travellers are in need of when arriving in a new context. Box Braids at Uncle Arba’in (2024) shows the artist getting her hair braided during her first visit to Nigeria in July 2023. While there, she attended an Islamic prayer ceremony, an Arba’in, for her father’s eldest brother, who had passed forty days prior. Recalling the intimate moment of her aunt and other guests attending to her hair, which unfolded amidst the ceremonial rites, Monilola depicts one of the many arrivals she experienced during her journey. V. & Blue Tree (2024) shows the artist’s mother sitting within a domestic setting with an ambiguous expression, having recently arrived in the US. The viewer is invited to reflect upon whether or not the work depicts a home and its host and to speculate on the multiple forms of presences unseen. She could be either a traveller or a guest; should she be a traveller, who are the ancestral beings standing at her side?

dust floating above my head like gnats in a daze (2024) is a delicate and somewhat ambiguous representation of a field of poppies—a plant of great beauty and a source of great succour, yet also of unspeakable pain through the manipulation and abuse of its narcotic derivatives. In the context of Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests, the work also alludes to the trade of these products, some of the most sought after commodities in history. The trading of poppies has also followed and spawned many geopolitical shifts and wars, including the nineteenth-century breakage of the trade imbalance accumulated over centuries between China and the rest of the world through the dumping of opium by Britain over the Chinese borders, as well as the subsequent cataclysmic Opium Wars (1839–60). In the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day, devastating conflicts in Myanmar or Afghanistan have also been fuelled by the trade of this plant—the centre of many other global voyages, routes, and mappings with ripple effects, often violent, across the world.

Works in the exhibition: dust floating above my head like gnats in a daze (2024), oil and pyrography on cowhide leather, 24 × 30 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of Li HE, Hong Kong; Box Braids at Uncle Arba’in (2024), oil and pyrography on cowhide leather, 185 × 125 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of Reiner Owezarek; V. & Blue Tree (2024), oil and pyrography on cowhide leather, 180 × 225 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of private collection of Reiner Owezarek