Published 28 AUG 2024

Opening – 6 SEP 2024, 5-9 pm
6 SEP till 9 NOV 2024

14 SEP 2024, 7 pm – Artist reading

The exhibition BloodLetter by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju at PSM consists of 9 new paintings in oil on leather, as well as 4 works on canvas and Birch tree bark, and an accompanying collection of texts. In this new body of work, she references and alters source photographs pulled from personal and family archives, as well as found images, to process residual feelings and questions around ancestral belonging, homecomings and homegoings, memory, grief, and the beauty amidst it all. A text by José B. Segebre will further enrich the exhibition.

On the occasion of Berlin Art Week , on Saturday September 14th at 7pm, Monilola will hold a reading of the texts conceived around the exhibition’s themes. 

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (born 1996) is a Nigerian-American artist and author based in Berlin. She graduated with distinction from New York University, where she studied studio art and social and cultural analysis. She is also an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Through painting, writing, performance and installation, she balances intimate experiences of connection, violence, and healing against broader observations on cultural distortion and identity. She has done extensive curatorial and editorial work with SAVVY Contemporary and Archive Books, among others. Earnestly (2022, Archive Books) is her debut collection of writing.

Recent solo exhibitions include Saint V., Tarte Vienna, Vienna (2023); Gymnasia, A plus A Gallery, Venice, (2023); Hands Full of Air, Galerie im Turm, Berlin (2020); and Eve of Intuition; The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER), Berlin (2020). Ilupeju has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Twilight is a Place of Promise at Esther Schipper, Berlin; non playable character, School for Curatorial Studies Venice & The Fairest, Venice (2022); my whole body changed into something else, Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg (2021); where will i be buried, Flux Factory, New York (2020); and Queer Intimacy and States of Emotions, Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019).