Of Presence and Absence: Motunrayo Akinola, Aisha Seriki

Akinola and Seriki’s distinct practices both emerge from performative methodologies that question the politics of access, visibility, and belonging. Working largely within monochromatic palettes, both artists consider how history and ritual intersect, drawing on their experiences between Nigeria and the United Kingdom to reimagine concepts of representation and spirituality. While this exhibition places the two artists in conversation for the first time, both develop symbolic visual languages through immersive installations and share overlapping conceptual concerns. Motunrayo Akinola received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Aisha Seriki received an MA in Photography and an MFA in Fine Arts and Humanities from Royal College of Art, London. 

Motunrayo Akinola (b. 1992, London, UK) creates abstract compositions in charcoal on linen, where gestural strokes foreground the elemental process of mark-making. Curved, imperfect lines derive from a series of performative acts in the artist’s studio, asserting presence while structuring compositions that oscillate between dense blackness and negative space. These drawings are assembled into large-scale installations, as though fragments of a larger whole. Akinola's work is shaped by routine and repetition, yet it unfolds through imaginary landscapes molded by symbolic form. Through abstraction, Akinola considers the fragile cohesion of things coming together, interacting, balancing, and perhaps falling apart again.

While seemingly elusive, Akinola’s imagery references subtle systems and cultural codes that suggest the politics of othering. Certain forms evoke teeth, alluding to historical practices of teeth blackening in parts of Southeast Asia, once traditionally regarded as a marker of beauty. Akinola is drawn to shifting generational attitudes toward beauty and blackness, and the ways these transformations can enable more self-affirming relationships to heritage. As a British-Nigerian artist who has lived between both countries, Motunrayo’s practice examines how place, identity and movement are experienced across contexts. These compositions also allude to the form of the rising or setting sun, suggesting ritual, cyclical time, and rebirth. Faint gesso marks in the background evoke ancestral spirits or ghostly guidance. Akinola’s drawings reflect a type of mapmaking of histories and consciousness, forming emotive landscapes that are at once dystopian and quietly optimistic. Sunrise, teeth, and gesture emerge as symbols not only of perseverance, but of psychological survival and renewal. 

Aisha Seriki (b. 1998, Lagos, Nigeria) adopts a sculptural approach to photography that reinterprets the medium’s history and dynamics of representation from a non-Western paradigm. Seriki’s installation combines staged black-and-white portraiture with small sculptural objects that embed photographic images. The portraits evoke an imaginary, dreamlike atmosphere that depicts a central female character interacting with symbolic props in an undefined, suspended space. The figure interacts with her shadow, reflection, and mirroring image, alluding to the multiple layers of the physical body and the spiritual self. The sculptures, by contrast, emphasize the tactile process of photography as objects and active elements of an archive. Taking the form of hair combs cast in bronze, they incorporate photo polymer gravure printing and cyanotype prints, conjuring grainy images of time passed. In other works, Seriki combines metal fabrication and linear structures with photographs to create assemblages that suggest relics of spiritual devotion.

Seriki’s interest stems from research into nineteenth-century photographic practices, at the medium’s inception, known as “spirit photography”. In the mid-1800s, photography’s promise of scientific truth raised questions about how the visible might relate to the unseen dimensions of lived experience. The field of “spirit photography” emerged as an attempt to document the visibly unknown — ghosts, auras, and the spiritual world among the living. Many proponents of spirit photography sought to connect with people they have lost, with the optimistic belief that photography may be able to connect us with the spirit world. Seriki places this Western history of spirit photography in dialogue with West African paradigms of representation, positioning the Yoruba concept of Orí Inú—the inner head that serves as spiritual consciousness and guide—alongside photography’s early metaphysical aspirations. For Seriki, image-making becomes ritual rather than documentation. Her portraits employ techniques of mirroring, doubling, and sacred forms such as calabashes and cowrie shells, suggesting gestures of healing, embodiment, and reconnection with ancient knowledge. The sculptures, intimate and devotional, carry a sacred presence. Rather than separating mind, body, and spirit, Seriki presents identity as relational and spiritually grounded.

Together, Motunrayo Akinola and Aisha Seriki form a shared language in which presence and absence, fragmentation and renewal, are understood as both ancestral inheritance and contemporary necessity. Across both practices, ritual emerges not as tradition alone, but as a living strategy for re-examination, resilience, and transformation.

About Motunrayo Akinola (b. 1992, London, UK) 
Motunrayo Akinola is a British-Nigerian artist working across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, and sound. Akinola holds a First-Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University of East London and a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He has worked with a variety of everyday materials in his multimedia practice. Akinola’s solo commission for Flatland Projects (UK), titled The one about the thing under the bridge, exhibited in September-December 2025, incorporates an installation of works made from corrugated cardboard. 

In 2025, Akinola’s solo exhibitions also included I ’n’ I at Magma Galleries (Melbourne) and The Door 03 at Palmer Gallery (London). In 2024, his postgraduate residency with South London Gallery (London) culminated in the exhibition, Knees Kiss Ground, which traveled to Bonington Gallery (Nottingham) in 2025. Akinola also presented recent exhibitions at blank projects (Cape Town), Messums (London), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), MIRROR Gallery (Plymouth), and Indigo+Madder (London), between 2024-2025. He was selected by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) for their exhibition New Contemporaries in 2025. Akinola has also participated at the High House Artist Residency in 2024. He has been featured in recent art fairs including Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2025), India Art Fair (2025), Frieze London (2024), and Art X Lagos (2024). Akinola lives and works in London.

About Aisha Seriki (b. 1998, Lagos, Nigeria) 
Aisha Olamide Seriki is a Nigerian-British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, sculpture, and mixed media, drawing on Yoruba cosmology, archival research, and personal history to challenge dominant narratives within photographic and visual culture. Seriki holds a First-Class degree in Global Liberal Arts from SOAS University (London), and received an MA in Photography and an MFA in Fine Arts and Humanities from Royal College of Art, London. She received the Frank Bowling Scholarship at the Royal College of Art and was a finalist for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (2021). Her project Orí Inú received the RCA’s New Photography Prize, the SW Darkroom Award, and the inaugural JM Finn Graduate Artist Award (2023). In 2024, she won the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, and in 2025 she was selected for the RCA BLK x Yinka Shonibare Foundation residency at the G.A.S Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. 

Her solo exhibition, Orí Inú, was held at Doylewham Gallery (London) in 2024. Seriki has participated in recent group exhibitions at London Design Festival, Photo London, Photo Basel, Bomb Factory Art Foundation (London), Christie’s (London), and Peckham24 (London), between 2024-2025. Seriki lives and works in London.