East, London
Ebun Sodipo
An Ominous Presence
Soft OpeningWe are pleased to present Ebun Sodipo's solo exhibition An Ominous Presence. In An Ominous Presence, Ebun Sodipo presents her largest works to-date, with a suite of new collage works centred around an interpretation of the gothic that offers a re-framing of both social and art history. Traversing ideas of horror, the end of the world, death, fear, mystery, mythology, ghostliness and the unknown, these unsettling new works extend the artist's exploration of the idea that the trans woman represents a threat of danger and destruction. Arranging images across a reflective metallic surface and encasing them in a thick layer of clear resin, Sodipo immortalises the figures, phrases and scenes that she assembles. While the glimmer and shine of her materials offers an allegory for the aesthetic expressions of transformation, Sodipo deliberately obscures self-reflection and stacks her images to complicate their clarity, their translucency enabling their contents to merge and generate new meanings. With every image carefully selected and positioned, the works in An Ominous Presence seek to reimagine the way we conceive of the past, time and history through images. Titling the exhibition after a collage that includes the phrase "I'm an ominous presence the shape of a girl", Sodipo prefigures an atmosphere of uneasiness among the works, a reverberating sense of foreboding that the trans woman presents in the world. Incorporating references from contemporary visual culture, architecture and history, An Ominous Presence borrows the visual language of gothicism and the ruin to posit that queerness could be capable of dismantling entrenched heteropatriarchal systems of belief. Ebun Sodipo's (b. 1993, London, UK) work has recently been included in exhibitions held at g39, Cardiff; Southwark Park Galleries, London; Site Gallery, Sheffield and Collective, Edinburgh as part of Jerwood Survey III (2024); Soft Opening at Paul Soto, Los Angeles; (2024, solo); CCA Derry~Londonderry: The Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry (2024); Inter.pblc, Copenhagen (2024, solo); Phillida Reid, London (2024); Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2024); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2024); Neven, London (2024); Vitrine, Basel (2023, solo); VO Curations, London (2023, solo); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022, solo); VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2022); FACT, Liverpool (2022) and The Block Museum of Art, Evanston (2021) among others. The artist has performed at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2025); Performance Art Museum, Los Angeles (2024); Edinburgh Arts Festival, Edinburgh (2024); Le Guess Who Festival, The Netherlands (2023); Live Collision International Festival at Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2023); Juf, Madrid (2023); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2022); Camden Arts Centre, London (2021); Frieze Art Fair, London (2021); South London Gallery, London (2020) and Auto Italia, London (2019).