Ojooluwatide Ojo: In the Quiet of Repair

Set in a family home built by the artist’s grandfather, In the Quiet of Repair is an intimate meditation on maintenance, time, and quiet transformation. This body of work by Ojooluwatide Ojo reflects on how spaces and people evolve alongside one another, holding stories, and signs of wear through time. Tracing the emotional and architectural threads that bind us to the spaces we grow within.

At the heart of this exhibition is the home itself. It is both subject and setting: a place that has witnessed generations of women shifting, adapting, and evolving within its walls – first the artist’s mother, and now the artist. Through this deeply personal lens, the artist also addresses the broader erosion of traditional African architecture and values. Homes once rooted in intention, climate, and community, have given way to generic, unfeeling structures severed from cultural context; a failure in adaptation. The artist reveals how architecture can mirror the state of human connection and intentionality.

Equally central is Ojo’s perspective as a woman living in the same home where her mother once came of age. She reflects on what it means to grow through time and space, to inhabit a place shaped by the lives of women before her, and to navigate womanhood through inherited rooms, routines, and identities. As the artist notes, Time and space hold on to our stories, our identities tucked into little decisions we make. In this context, womanhood is not a fixed role; it is an evolving experience, shaped by memory, environment, and lineage. The women in these works are both caretakers and inheritors, balancing the weight of tradition with the need for change. They tend to the home as they tend to themselves, negotiating what to hold onto and what to release. In Ojo’s work, womanhood is not simply present in the home; it is the quiet rhythm of its repair and renewal.

Ojooluwatide Ojo employs two particularly significant techniques: thread, a tool for repair, both aesthetic and symbolic; and blue staining, used as a visual metaphor for wear and tear and the passage of time. Tide’s process—layering fluid blue stains, hand-stitching thread, binding, reinforcing, adding layers of meaning—mirrors the small, persistent gestures of maintenance required to keep both home and self whole. The exhibition also features 30 Shobs, an interactive installation in which visitors move from passive observers into active participants. This immersive piece offers a glimpse into the compound itself, from its outer walls to its inner quarters, and includes a table where visitors can respond to reflective prompts, anchoring their own memories and notions of home in the exhibition’s themes. The installation creates a dialogue between visitors and the space, extending the exhibition’s exploration of the influence of space on experience.

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