Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa

I am Free

2023,
Immersive staging

Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa draws on a wide range of media and materials for his installations: his performatively charged, mostly walk-in stagings include early drawings, wooden objects, painted fabric, embroidered textiles, sculptures, videos, and readymades – such as a bathtub. His entire living environment could potentially be integrated: his son’s drawings as well as basketball and painting utensils or the embroidered blanket from his couch. The artist does not omit adverse aspects either: racism in everyday life, for example, to which he was always exposed while growing up in South Tyrol or the many traces of Orientalism throughout Vienna’s urban space. That includes, for example, the zebra motif on buckets of paint or the Julius Meinl logo, which depicts a young Ottoman wearing a red fez. For the Kyiv Biennial, the artist has conceived the walk-through installation I am free; given the abundance and complexity of the subject, he views it as a sketch around considerations of the freedom of the subject or the collective. The leitmotif is a hardware store grid that shows visitors the way through the immersive staging, which includes a series of drawings on fabric, scenes related to everyday life, and photos from glossy magazines, as well as a sound work. The latter is based on the audio from five coordinated video sequences (including gusts of wind or the background music in the hardware store, in which, if you listen carefully, the refrain “I am your brother, I’m free” is audible). Superimposition of the sound from the videos creates an overall effect reminiscent of distant artillery. Like a tonal echo of the monstrosities of the war of aggression, it accompanies the visitors through the installation, which encourages “immersion” in worlds defined by abstract concepts such as longing, assertion, invocation, and powerlessness, but also – as the artist notes – prompts visitors to recharge their batteries. (Christa Benzer)