Bunmi Agusto: Tales By Moonlight is a mixed-media installation featuring the digital animation, The Life Cycle of a Cowrie (2025) a summation of the sumptuous suite, of mid and small-scale compositions formed from pastel pencil, coloured pencil, ink and acrylic. Agusto's gaze is informed by her upbringing in Lagos, as a woman of Yoruba, Edo and Afro-Brazilian descent. Her paracosm Within, is a complex, imaginary world in the artist’s mind that functions as a repository for all that she encounters in her waking life. Her interiority is the domain of her primordial alter-ego Ó whose presence is denoted by hands extending from the braided terrain of Within. It is a world structured from transmissions of overlapping narratives of ancestral knowledge, spiritual consciousness, cultural theories, graphic novels and gaming, which all inform of Agusto's evolution and selfhood.
Previous stories from Within feature Ó's interactions bridging the physical and spiritual realms. Sometimes a focus might highlight the presences of particular beings or other manifestations that represent aspects of Ó as other characters with specific capabilities or powers that Agusto at intervals will throw a light on their story. The artist says of her long-form project, "...ancient knowledge of the divine mechanics of our universe has been embedded within fantasy and magical storytelling", of which, Tales By Moonlight relates to the lineage of night-time African oral traditions of storytelling. The installation features the night sky being prepared for the physical realm. Like photographic stills, we see the divine hands of Ó handling and dangling cowrie shells like puppets on a string from the spiritual realm into a cityscape, in, Braided Hand with Cowries (1 & 2) and Theatre in the Skies (2025). Other works in the room liken the production to the staging mechanics of the theatre; we see different hands at play preparing the night sky curtain. Dyeing the Sky (2025) and Behind the Night's Cloak (2025), presents the dye pits of Kano in Northern Nigeria, and the processes of preparing and transporting the indigo.
About the artist
Bunmi Agusto is a world-builder (artist, writer, curator and art historian) focused on fantasy and magical storytelling. In her practice, she combines painting, drawing and printmaking to create vibrant compositions of a fantasy world she calls ‘Within’. Within is a paracosm in the artist’s mind that functions as a repository for all that she encounters in her waking life. The figures in her work are often family, friends and passersby pulled from reality and into her world as cross-reality migrants through their encounters with her.
She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, an MA in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University, London and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, for which she received distinctions in all three degrees.
Recent Exhibitions include; Clouds Never Die, TAFETA, London (solo - 2025); The Cave, Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, E-Werk, Freiburg (solo - 2025); Dialogue Between Two Clouds, Jnane Tamsna, Marrakech (solo - 2025); Growth of the Soil, Kristin Hjellegerde Gallery, London (group - 2025); TEFAF Maastricht, TAFETA, Maastricht (group - 2025); India Art Fair, kó, Delhi (group - 2025); Lands of the Living, DADA Gallery, London (solo - 2024); Collecting Now, Yemisi Shyllon Museum, Lagos (group - 2024); Untitled Art Fair, kó, Miami ( group - 2024); 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, TAFETA, London (group - 2024); Dallas Art Fair, TAFETA, Texas (group - 2024); New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre, London (group - 2024); TEFAF, TAFETA, Maastricht (group - 2024); Yinka Shonibare CBE RA: Free The Wind, The Spirit and The Sun, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (group - 2023); New Contemporaries, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (group - 2023); MFA Degree Show, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (group - 2023); Chasing Spirits, Foreign Agent, Lausanne (group - 2023); Reverie, DADA Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2023); baby hair and afros, Vortic Curated, London & Santa Monica Art Museum, Los Angeles, Virtual Reality(group - 2023); Outside, kó, Lagos (solo - 2022); Psychoscape, TAFETA, London (solo - 2022); Escape To Within, DADA Gallery, London (solo - 2021).
