This April, G.A.S. is delighted to welcome Aisha Olamide Seriki, a London-based Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans fine art photography, sculpture, bronze, and woodwork. During her four-week residency at G.A.S. Lagos, Aisha will deepen her research into Yoruba material culture through extensive fieldwork, archival exploration, and artisanal collaborations. Her work interrogates the camera’s colonial history as a vessel of objectivity. Her practice centers spiritual-material entanglements, emphasising ancestral technologies, Black temporalities, and non-linear memory.
Her itinerary includes site visits to Ibadan, Benin City, and Osogbo engaging directly with metal casters, carvers, artists and cultural historians. She will bring her own wax and silicon moulds to cast sculptural works in Benin, while also sourcing beeswax and exploring welding and fabrication techniques in Lagos. Parallel to this, she will develop new photographic work in collaboration with Leap of Dance Academy and landscape settings on the G.A.S. Farm. Aisha also intends to host community-facing programs, including a photographers’ roundtable and a conversation with multigenerational artisans, contributing to the wider cultural ecology through knowledge exchange, documentation, and network-building.
Courtesy of Aisha Seriki.
What is the current focus of your creative practice?
I am a multimedia artist, specialising in fine art photography, and sculpture. My practice explores the intricate relationship between historical narratives and contemporary realities, utilising the past as a method to comprehend and communicate present-day existence. I interrogate the camera’s historical association as a vessel of objectivity by drawing from surrealism, symbolism, and Yoruba philosophy, spiritualism to challenge photography’s connection to truth and time.
Courtesy of Aisha Seriki.
What drew you to apply for this residency and how do you think it will inform your wider practice?
I sought to deepen my understanding of Yoruba material culture, particularly the traditions of blacksmithing and carving. My goal was to engage in firsthand research with artisans who carry a rich, embodied history of craft, allowing me to learn directly from their techniques and philosophies. By immersing myself in these practices, I aim to integrate local methods of making into my own work.
Additionally, I was drawn to this residency as an opportunity to further explore Yoruba philosophy while connecting with local creatives. Through photography shoots and my research in Nigeria, I aim to expand and refine my creative practice.
Courtesy of Aisha Seriki.
Can you give us an insight into how you hope to use the opportunity?
This opportunity will allow me to research and develop my new visual project while collaborating with creatives to produce new images for the work. Additionally, I plan to experiment with techniques learned through workshops with local artisans, using these skills to create samples that will inform the sculptural component of the project.
ABOUT AISHA SERIKI
Aisha Olamide Seriki is a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist based in London, specialising in fine art photography and sculpture. Seriki works from a canon of personal histories which splice contemporary realities. Her practice is holistic and embodied, subverting formal photographic traditions. Cosmological systems such as the Yoruba Spiritual Tradition have informed the multisensory approach Seriki has to documentation, communication and creation. Through optics and trickery, she challenges the rigid imagination of self, creating space in the archive for a wider definition.
In 2023, she was awarded the Frank Bowling Scholarship and completed the Photography MA programme at the Royal College of Art, and in 2024 she completed her MFA in Fine Arts and Humanities. Aisha’s project Orí Inú received the RCA’s New Photography Prize, the SW Darkroom Award and the inaugural JM Finn Graduate Artist Award (2023). In May 2024, Aisha won the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography.
Aisha's residency is generously supported by the Royal College of Art Association of Black Students, Alumni & Friends (RCA BLK).
