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What Do We Become

What Do We Become title image black background with yellow text

What Do We Become is an exhibition expanding ideas of identity, home, and belonging.

We are excited to present this Young Barbican exhibition showcasing new works by artists Camilla Dilshat, Tolu Elusadé, Adanma Nwankwo and Ellen Warner.  

The title for this exhibition originates from ongoing research around ideas of language, belonging, and origins by artist-curator Tobi Alexandra Falade who is exploring how separation from homelands, impacts identity and cultural expression. A question revealed through considerations around her own identity as someone who has not yet returned ‘home’. Here, the artists respond to these themes and have developed new viewpoints within their practice culminating in newly commissioned artworks. 

£5 Young Barbican exhibition tickets

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What's inside the exhibition?

Central within this exhibition is the past, the present, and personal histories, explored by Dilshat through food and the body, Elusadé through image and language, Nwankwo through materiality and memory, and Warner through film and place. The exhibition explores the artists' research and developments, and the processes in their multidisciplinary practices. These works explore an interest in understanding issues around selfhood, and through this, they ask us to see the different ways diasporas can exist as hybrid.  

Camilla Dilshat

One person wearing jumper and blue jeans stands next to their sculpture

Camilla Dilshat

Camilla Dilshat is a sculpture and installation artist of Uyghur ethnicity born and based in London (b.1998). She is currently a student on the MA Fine Art course at City & Guilds of London Art School and has a studio in Brixton.

Adanma Nwankwo

Adanma is in a garden sitting and painting a slide

Adanma Nwankwo

As an interdisciplinary artist Adanma's work explores topics of her childhood, her identity as a Nigerian, and her cultural links to materials that influence her approaches to materiality.

Ellen Warner

Image of Ellen in black shirt hanging up her artwork

About Ellen Warner

Ellen explores navigating mixed heritage through family photographs, and the preparation of Korean food. They examine notions of heritage being rooted in intangible knowledge whilst considering the effect of environment on identity.

Tolu Elusadé

Image of person looking at themselves in the mirror

Tolu Elusadé

Tolu Elusadé employs the creative mediums of analogue photography and poetry to craft a compelling body of work that explores the intersection of Black British living, Yoruba spirituality, and Queer culture.

Tobi Alexandra Falade

Tobi Alexandra Falade held the Curatorial Traineeship at Barbican and iniva 2021-22, where she supported the first major London solo exhibition of artists Shilpa Gupta and Soheila Sokhanvari in the Curve Gallery, and Alice Neel in the Art Gallery. At iniva, she curated exhibitions of artists Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Rohan Ayinde, and assisted the Research Network, a programme which brings together creatives from several research partner institutions.

Her artworks focus on exploring hybrid identities and confronting the uncomfortable disconnect to heritage. She oil paints on large canvases where hybrid figures meet in landscapes and locations that are merged, blended or collaged. Here she creates otherworldly environments that convey the complex nature of inhabiting an indigenous body that is away and distant from a homeland. Her research provides individual perspectives on diasporic experiences, allowing her to explore narratives of selfhood and explore the futures of diasporans.

Falade co-founded Platform Black, a community which highlights the work of Black creatives, and graduated from Wimbledon College of Art, BA Fine Art: Painting. Falade lives and works in London, Reading, and Liverpool.

www.tobialexandrafalade.com

www.instagram.com/tobialexandrafalade

Guest Artists

Guest Artists Tomilola Olumide, Sara David, and Barbara Majek presented their processes, themes, and artistic practice to the four Young Creatives during the programme to discover and investigate themes around hybridity, identity, and diaspora. 

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