Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s art explores the relationship between the environment, line, and representation. Moving between drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, her work responds to and forges dialogues between global current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Systems that capture, mediate, and direct the movement of people and matter is a recurring subject of investigation in her practice. In 2018, she built her first functional playground, appropriating construction materials and conventional household items to form a composition of non-prescriptive stimuli. The artist has made four functional playgrounds to date.
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Temitayo Ogunbiyi confronts systems of surveillance and behaviour in digital space through notions of play. By considering the Planetary Sensorium as a monitoring structure birthed from Western constructs, she investigates how play can subvert and highlight its pervasive surveillance systems. She highlights spontaneous and vulnerable online interactions with other people that shift how we understand ‘self’ and ‘other’, and may include laughter. Her project is focused on building a play space that pivots from Lagos, informed by its inhabitants’ individual stories, their use of digital technology, and the surveillance mechanisms embedded therein.