STATEMENT
My works explore the themes of home, travel, desire and memory. In my current work, I am engaging with the idea of absence and presence. The absence of some of the most basic and important things to us when we are relocated into a new place and the presence of their substitutes. I explore this idea through my Yoruba tribal Nigerian meals as a cultural element and identity.
In this body of work, I am interested in food as an essential commodity for human. Interestingly, food business has been my mother’s business for over two decades where she owns and sells Yoruba Nigerian foods in a community in Lagos, Nigeria. The abundance of these native meals at home in Nigeria and other places I have briefly lived abroad in comparison to the inaccessibility of these specific meals here in Gainesville has particularly inspired my current paintings.
However, the subject does not only include the food itself but also some family members and even friends that prepared these meals back home. At this point, the absence of these people and meals in my new environment have become a part of my subject matter inspiring the themes of desires, nostalgia, replacement and cultural identity.
BIO
Monsur Adeniyi Awotunde was born in Igbo Ora, Oyo, Nigeria. He attended The Polytechnic Ibadan and Auchi School of Art in Nigeria. Awotunde received his BA at the University of Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom and MFA at the University of Florida, United States.
My works explore the themes of home, travel, desire and memory. In my current work, I am engaging with the idea of absence and presence. The absence of some of the most basic and important things to us when we are relocated into a new place and the presence of their substitutes. I explore this idea through my Yoruba tribal Nigerian meals as a cultural element and identity.
In this body of work, I am interested in food as an essential commodity for human. Interestingly, food business has been my mother’s business for over two decades where she owns and sells Yoruba Nigerian foods in a community in Lagos, Nigeria. The abundance of these native meals at home in Nigeria and other places I have briefly lived abroad in comparison to the inaccessibility of these specific meals here in Gainesville has particularly inspired my current paintings.
However, the subject does not only include the food itself but also some family members and even friends that prepared these meals back home. At this point, the absence of these people and meals in my new environment have become a part of my subject matter inspiring the themes of desires, nostalgia, replacement and cultural identity.
BIO
Monsur Adeniyi Awotunde was born in Igbo Ora, Oyo, Nigeria. He attended The Polytechnic Ibadan and Auchi School of Art in Nigeria. Awotunde received his BA at the University of Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom and MFA at the University of Florida, United States.
