Ope Lori
“I am a conceptual and political artist who works primarily with the moving image and photography, around the politics of representation, race, gender and sexual identity and the female form in popular culture.
Playfully re-writing these racialized scripts, looking and being seen, recognition and misrecognition take place, through the use of homoerotic images ‘of’ and ‘between’, black women and white women in visual dialogues and new to my most recent work, the incorporation of the male form.
My practice (Ope Lori) aims to draw the viewer in through the ways that looking dynamics are turned upside down, from positions of power, to powerlessness, from being passive spectators to consciously viewing participants.
I am interested in the use of aesthetics in making visually pleasing screen images, but I am also drawn to non-aesthetic spaces and strategies, that draws the viewer into the work by experiencing the image, through desire and pleasure.
My works are purposely thought-provoking and challenging through my explicit use of stereotypes, which focus on taboo subjects such as interracial mixing, gender role-playing and sexuality, all of which stem from the feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’. Of Nigerian heritage, I live and work in London.”
Photo from http://eyonart.blogspot.co.uk/
Ope Lori is one of the artists I curated in Mallorca
