Ara Deinde is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Ibadan, Nigeria. Born in Lagos, Ara took interest in art from a young age, spending his time doodling in his school notebooks. He uses a diverse range of mediums to reflect on themes of identity, migration, memory and fantasy.
Ara is a self taught artist. He left his degree program in Agricultural Engineering in 2019 to pursue a career in the arts. He was an artist-in-residence at KUTA Art Foundation between 2020 and 2021. The residency culminated in his first solo exhibition in 2022.
Ara’s works have been exhibited in Nigeria, UK and USA, and he has taken on several notable painting and mural commissions. He has also been featured on several publications home and abroad, including Ake Review for African art and Literature, Up the Staircase quarterly review, and Insight Magazine. Ara cites Toyin Odutola Ojih, Sam Gilliam, Frida Kahlo, James Grashow, Florian Baudrexel, Pablo Picasso and Yayoi Kusama among the influences on his work.
Ara Deinde’s paintings and drawings reflect on what he refers to as Mental Migration: the idea of reconstructing mental spaces, renegotiating reality in the process. Drawing from his personal experiences, pictures of his friends and family and a huge dose of his own imagination, he sets his subjects up in imagined dreamscapes, thus contemplating the boundaries between the real and imagined. Sometimes his paintings approach the outright abstract and fantastical, discarding any leashes to the known world, letting the mind free to wander wild. Oil, acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal and ballpoint pens are his go-to mediums for making his paintings and drawings.
Ara’s cardboard sculptures explore the same tension described above from a more dimensional standpoint. Through his cubist assembly of intricate cardboard and paper cuts, He visualizes the unending struggles of the human mind – the struggle between objective rationality and subjective expression – even when at rest. His work invites us to inspect the machinations of our minds in ways that fit us with new perspectives for reconstructing our own realities. About his new foray into sculpture, Ara has this to say:
“I used to follow my father to his job as a woodworker. I didn’t like it because I felt it always encroached upon my free time as a boy, but it was a vital part of my development into a young adult and ultimately, an artist. I picked up basic woodworking skills based on this influence, skills which I call upon now in my practice. While in university, I started making crafts: bags and books made from cardboard, leather, paper etc to earn extra cash to sustain myself. That experience deepened my relationship with paper and cardboard as versatile materials. Now I find myself exploring new frontiers in materiality vis-a-vis my work as an artist. Of particular interest to me is not just the crafty and aesthetic value of these wood-related materials and products, but more importantly their value as markers of place, time and identity.
Cardboard is synonymous with migration of products, so it makes me think of a concept I call mental migration (the idea of moving to new places in the mind, exploring the possible, the fantastical, while retaining the certain, the physical in the moment) which I have been exploring through my paintings. Paper, on the other hand, is a medium of information migration, at least in a traditional sense. Together, these are products sourced from wood, that wonderful material I used to shy away from as a kid in my father’s workshop.
This brings me to an important element of the materiality discourse: sustainability. Wood – and by extension, its products – is at the heart of the environmental sustainability conversation. As I ruminate on the social calling of these mediums, I can’t help but think of the metaphoric meddling of the materials with the sustainability of migration and globalization within the contexts of economic and sociocultural world order. I am thinking of how the psyche of the consciousness of Nigerians and other Africans gets impacted by the “japa” syndrome” – physical migration of people to find greener pastures. These thoughts continue to shape the trajectory of my work.
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