London Art Fair 23'
YOU ARE HERE 51° 30° 369 N 07 59 W
This project showcases Luqmaan Godfrey and Louisa Boyd contemplating and charting the cartographic terrain of contemporary life. With reference to Hans Ulrich Olbrist's alternative atlas of contemporary cartographies, Mapping It Out, these two artists eschew the various proiection modes of conventional maps to navigate spatial or ideological topography, and instead examine the psychographics and connections in societies, plotting encounters of the past and present to project hopes for the future. Godfrey and Boyd couldn't be more different visually and ideologically - the first dances to the vibrancy of a manic city, while the other finds solitude in nature.
This results in a mix of intoxicating quietness, oscillating between opposing polarities of quirky vs profound, epic vs intimate, cynical vs sincerity. The philosophical dialogue running through both though is that we live in an Anthropocene era where social relationships and interactions in nature shape the world, where "reality" is a continually changing map that is malleable but ultimately transient.
Luqmaan Godfrey is the alter ego of Damilola Odusote who is a successful muralist and commercial artist. Odusote has a very unique background and in creating the Luqmaan Godfrey persona, he wants to explore the underlying issues that formed his identity as a Black person brought up in a rough White town in Essex - Luqmaan is one of his Nigerian middle names and Godfrey is in memory of his foster parent's surname. The proposed work for LAF is his first outing as Luqmaan Godfrey and will be an installation in the style of his mural work consisting of vignettes of smaller mixed media drawings, poems, text and collage linked to a central spherical map drawing. Fundamental to his work is navigating the complex political, cultural and identity dislocation of his personal journey as a microcosm of contemporary human discourse.
