Yewande YoYo Odunubi
Yewande YoYo Odunubi is an artist, researcher and cultural producer whose practice revolves around the enquiry: "what does the body need to dream?" Viewing the body beyond a singular, fixed form, identity and / or function, she explores how we see, read, shape, and practise ourselves. Drawing on freestyle-improvisation as choreographic and pedagogical methodologies, Yewande explores how intuitive experiences, bodily rhythms, and embodied knowledge contribute to world-building processes.
Her work often explores how theory, memory and experience can be processed, translated, and gestured in / through the body, interested in what can be enacted into space through attunement to the ‘interior as a location of agency’ (Kevin Quashie). Simultaneously exploring what might constitute a poetics of the body, Yewande experiments with movement, performance, film, sound, text, textiles and facilitation as a means of translation, experimentation and dialogue with the body’s present and imagined possibilities.
With / Beyond the body’s materiality and movement, her recent work examines material processes as sites of embodied knowledge and memory. Current explorations in natural indigo dyeing traditions have led her to consider how gestures persist within and through material processes, particularly across trans-cultural lineages, and how these processes might carry choreographic and transformative potential beyond the material itself.
Yewande’s work has been programmed by art spaces and cultural organisations such as Art + Public Life, Barbican, Fest en Fest, G39, Glasgow International, Milton Keynes Arts Centre, Now Gallery, International Curators Forum (ICF), Sainsbury Centre and TBA21. Yewande was ICF’s Diasporic Curatorial Animateur Fellow (2021-2022), received the Jerwood Live Work Fund 2021, and has completed residencies with g39 and Yinka Shonibare Foundation/Guest Projects Digital. She is part of Rose Choreographic School’s 2024-2026 cohort.
As a cultural producer, she has produced public programmes in art spaces and cultural institutions including V&A, Wellcome Collection, Tate, Now Gallery, ICF, Free Word, CCA Glasgow, BLANK100 and 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning.
Alongside artist, poet and friend Rohan Ayinde, Yewande is one-half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we.
