I am scarcely awake and have risen, Saint Takyi, oil on canvas, 60 x 120cm, 2025
Twilight Contemporary presents Subvert Your Gaze to Meet Mine, a group exhibition which invites you to experience the explorations, memories, dreams and imaginings contained within the worlds of an assemblage of black women and non - binary artists.
Guided by a speculative and liberation-focused framework put forward in Lola Olufemi's work and specifically ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’. Olufemi blends poetry and manifesto to reframe resistance. Resistance is reconstituted as a collective practice, where process triumphs over outcome and conflict is replaced with collective refusal and care. Within this imagination becomes a site of resistance, the ability to dream and experiment are repurposed as liberatory tools in the face of the overbearing hegemonies we live under. Olufemi invites us to find sanctuary in our own internal world and the internal worlds of others, towards reclamation and radical collective nurture.
The works span across mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, mixed media, textiles and installation drawing together threads of fantasy, personal histories and identity. Within this you will find real moments of intimacy captured with frankness, or private chaos immortalised in stillness by a directed lens. You will find works drawing on found objects, family archives and vestiges of times past all contained within and the product of precious emotional processing and reflection. Alongside this all, you will find works formed of constructed dreamscapes with imagined figures and scenes; embellished figments of the artist’s imagination complexified. Grounded in folklore and heritage, brought to life by the artists’ rich internal worlds.
Within this variety and range, threads of commonality remain. These artists and their resultant works remain grounded in diasporic consciousness. They construct their worlds within polarities, the tangible and intangible, memory and fantasy, the intimate and the overt, the individual and the collective. There is an unmistakable vulnerability interwoven, through which the audience is invited to mindfully venture.
Our most private thoughts and feelings, our tender origins and our intentional constructions are not just personal but deeply political- shaped by the world around us and shaping the world we want to create. Through the assembly of these artists and works we can find the potential for sanctuary, reclamation of agency but, most integrally, the reconstitution of an alternative.
Curation and words by Téa-Anya Earle
As part of the Twilight Curator Program
Terrain, Monica Okello, Oil on Concrete, 30 x 20cm, 2025
EXHIBITING ARTISTS:
JOIN OUR MAILING LIST:
Thank you!
Copyright 2025 © Twilight Contemporary Ltd.
