Djeneba Aduayom
Categories: Celebrity & Music / Fashion & Beauty I / Fashion & Beauty II / Multimedia / Portraiture & Athletes / Video
Overview
Featured
Instagram x Vanity Fair — Met Gala 2024
Women’s Health - Angel Reese
HIGHSNOBIETY - André 3000
TIME - Issa Rae
Blanc - Teyana Taylor
Djeneba Aduayom’s creative practice explores visual parallels of reality and fantasy. For this 2022 personal series, Aduayom was called to produce a trauma response to the deteriorating health of our planet.
As our collective actions and inactions continue to destroy our world and resources, the nature of this reality we live in today is brutal. This series serves as a poetic vision of what we are transforming our planet into.
Aduayom used a combination of software programs to layer and animate multiple digital images into single video piece, with subtle and targeted movements that further depict the feeling of the Earth melting and rising levels of toxicity in the air.
Aduayom asks what will be left of us once we are gone: Merely man-made installations that may offer a testament to our past presence? Or, perhaps, nothing at all—only a scorched planet haunted by humankind’s distant memories and false illusions?
This series won multiple awards and was featured in Fotografiska Stockholm’s 2023 group exhibition, In Bloom.
Project
Atmospheric Perspective
Project
Self-Reflection While in Isolation
A personal self-portrait series Djeneba Aduayom undertook in the early quarantining days of the COVID19 pandemic, using items only readily available at home.
Aduayom explains in a 2020 Washington Post article, “During this unique moment of daily solitude and reflection, I have found myself getting lost in self-portraiture, developing a new language of internal expression.”
Images from this series went on to be featured in the world renowned traveling exhibition of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion curated by Antwaun Sargent and presented by Aperture.
Project
Capsulated
Internationally exhibited with limited editions available for purchase at Galerie Gomis from Djeneba Aduayom’s iconic 2018 series.
Two images from this series were selected for Ekow Eshun’s hardcover book, In the Black Fantastic, which assembles art and imagery across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative.
Eshun, E. (2022). In the Black Fantastic. Thames & Hudson. The MIT Press. Purchase
Djeneba Aduayom (she/her) is a self-taught artist whose work is marked by a sense of movement, performance, and personal interrogation. Her aesthetic is as much influenced by her multidisciplinary training and extensive travels, as it is by her multicultural heritage.
Aduayom always seeks to capture layers of emotions contained within people and their relation to landscape, often with hints of abstraction and surrealism. The ability to speak multiple visual languages, both literally and metaphorically, fuels her inspiration and creative output. The imaginative worlds she builds invite her viewers inwards and beckons them to travel to a universe of their very own making.
Aduayom believes we are complex beings that are united by underlying commonalities. The human experience is more universal and uniting than individual and derisive. Dualities exist, juxtaposing against one another in striking and complementary ways. These observations are at the core of her creative expression.
Aduayom is based in Southern California.
Bio