A SENSE OF PLACE
OLUKEMI LIJADU
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOLADE BANJO
INTERVIEW BY BEN BROOME
FOOTWEAR EXCLUSIVE: REEBOK LTD
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ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Focusing on moving image and sound, Olukemi Lijadu is an artist and DJ who uses the power of cinema to take listeners on sonic journeys weaving between cultures and time.
BEN BROOME
You began calling yourself an “artist” two years ago: Do you feel as though you’ve found your place in the art world?
OLUKEMI LIJADU
It’s difficult in a capitalist world where productivity is measured by how much money you make and how you spend your time. So many people judge productivity in this way that it’s sometimes difficult to see your place in the world as an artist. The pursuit of art is a nonsensical way to spend one’s time—you’re literally walking in the opposite direction to how the rest of the world is moving.
BB
How do your studies inform what you make, that contention with the path set out for you versus the path you’ve chosen?
OL
I went to Stanford University in California. Some people believe that university is to set you up for a job, others believe it’s a place to explore knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I’d say I bought into the latter—I majored in philosophy. Art school was never on my radar. I have always loved art: I grew up around art, because my dad collects West African sculpture and painting. After literally six different careers post-graduation, I applied for the ICA’s Image Behaviour grant. I was one of six artists awarded and, suddenly, I was being referred to as an “artist.” In hindsight, I had been an artist for some time, just not self-consciously.
BB
And now that you’re consciously an artist, what’s changed?
OL
Going from working in organizations to being an artist, I had to reframe how I thought of productivity: reading and researching is work; watching a film is work; going to an exhibition is work.
BB
The difficulty of being an artist is that you really are accountable for yourself: there’s no consequence if you don’t adhere to your own rules other than how it affects your very being, which is a giant, intangible, terrifying consequence.
OL
It’s the paradox of freedom: it can be paralyzing. When you have freedom to structure your time however you choose, you understand how arbitrary rules are. But I have to pay my taxes; I have to DJ a certain number of times a month so that I can pay my rent; I need to apply for grants and residencies.
To be very frank, being an artist in this economy is very stressful. Every other day I’m thinking about money—how to make it, how to keep going. A grant or residency can specify and restrict one’s focus for a certain amount of time that allows you to create within limitations. Limitations are helpful to complete something or to find notions of completion.
I’m from Lagos, where there just aren’t as many opportunities for artists. To me, London is the land of opportunity: it feels as though they’re endless. I dedicate a portion of time every week to apply for grants and residencies. At this point, I have a trove of ideas for work—I might make them today or next month or in five years, and so I rotate around those, that treasure chest of ideas—I pull one out and build on it for an application. In that process, I often will fall back in love with the idea and what it could become.
BB
With the work you make, you can’t just pick up a paintbrush and start working. Your process of making requires pre-production and a great deal of orchestration before any making actually begins. Do you let excitement guide your sense of purpose and direction?
OL
Absolutely. The making is oftentimes in that moment in the morning when I’m revisiting my thoughts. That’s why my relationship with time is weird—it doesn’t map on to the standards by which productivity is perceived. The last time I was in Lagos, I was spending a lot of time with an old record collector in his 80s. I loved speaking with him and getting to know him, and I’d bring my camera along to our chats. I started working on a project with him, because it felt right.
BB
You didn’t have any idea of what you were making when you started that project? Did you just have an innate feeling that it was important?
OL
I get anxious about things being lost. That’s what first drew me to a camera when I was a teenager—it was the fear of losing my grandparents. This project was driven by a kind of the anxiety that this grandpa could die soon, that his knowledge would be lost. He holds an incredible wealth of history and information about our country’s musical landscape, and no one seems to care. The feeling that people should care is what led me to being an artist and to studying philosophy.
BB
Was this fear of loss your motivation for making Guardian Angel (2022)?
OL
Some footages used in Guardian Angel was shot ten years ago, when I was anxious about my grandmother dying. So, yes, it definitely comes from there, as well as from her actual passing and the physical loss of her presence. The way she lived encapsulated my philosophical pursuit: a recognition of the value of African epistemology.
In Nigeria, where I grew up, it’s clear that many aspects of colonialism worked in the severe misunderstanding of our knowledge and cultural output. My grandmother was able to straddle two cultures in a way that I see as very valuable. My grandmother was Catholic but also had a respect for her ancestors, nature, and Yoruba culture and spirituality. In contemporary Lagos, Yoruba spirituality is not just looked down upon: it’s taboo.
Once you change people’s religion, you change their whole orientation towards life. Everybody now looks to the West, and that’s very, very dangerous. For me, as a Black person, I was frustrated going to school in the UK: I spent years studying white people’s culture, while everybody else in my class was studying people that look like them. Not only did I barely study any Black people, I barely studied any women. That didn’t make me feel good at all.
BB
Is that a motivation for carving out your own practice, because it allows you to make your own syllabus?
OL
Absolutely, but what’s also important to me is that my work has multiple points of access: it’s vital that my work is able to be understood and felt by people who have not had the same education as myself. That’s why music is so crucial to my work, because music is a visceral entry point. Very few people would think “I can’t listen to music, that’s too advanced for me.” But people may well think that of an academic journal or a lecture. There’s also an emotional language to music that can be understood outside of formal language.
For my master’s thesis I was looking into complementary dualism, a concept very different from the foundations of Western philosophy. The latter has a tendency to categorize things in relation to their opposite; it’s very binary: if something is hot, it cannot be cold—it’s the foundation of Western science. Sophie Oluwole talks about how, in Yoruba epistemology, there’s this idea called “complementary dualism”: that a thing and its opposite can coexist. Yoruba culture is much more open to contradiction. The reason why I use music in so much of my work is because music is the best vehicle for expressing contradiction. You can have a song that feels simultaneously happy and sad. You can feel fear and euphoria simultaneously.
BB
And how does this inform the work you’re making, this more contradictory approach to the world?
OL
I’m trying to be as honest as possible, and, when being honest, a lot of contradictions coexist. In Guardian Angel, for example, I’m thinking about my affection for my grandmother and my distaste for the colonial history of the church alongside the fact that, if I’m on a plane that’s going to crash, I will still pray.
I didn’t go to art school and I’m finding myself in this world later than some of my peers but I see that as a strength. Hopefully my work pays off, but true payoff for me will happen when I’m dead, when my children’s children encounter my work and somehow understand themselves better because of it. But I would also like some money in the near future—that would be nice too!
