VILLAGER (b. A. Adekunle Adaranijo), they/them, is a Nigerian-born Contemporary Transdisciplinary Artist, Cultural Producer, and African Spirituality Practitioner. Moving across painting, collage, sculpture, performance, experimental film, installation, curation, and cultural facilitation, VILLAGER actively maps and queries the intersections of material memory & intelligence, Yorùbá knowledge systems, and postcolonial African identity as a dynamic topography of critical inquiry. VILLAGER's practice—deeply informed by their migration from Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S. in 2013—traces the relational interplay between objects, bodies, and spaces, exploring how form and content intersect to evoke experiential, spiritual, ancestral, and sensory possibilities, as well as elucidate social, cultural, and political resonances that transcend linear narratives.
Drawing from the frameworks of African Scholars such as Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor, VILLAGER's transdisciplinary research practice across artistic traditions unfolds as a ritualistic, discursive network of wayfinding that interrogates and maps the construction, transmission, and transformation of "tradition". Their work explores the evolution and dissemination of culture, history, identity, consciousness, and belonging—as forces that shift and strengthen across the contours of time, spirit, place, memory, and material—tracing how they shape tradition and examining how our architectures of being, seeing, and knowing are shaped and transformed by our experience of it.
VILLAGER engages their work as a long intergenerational study which eclectically links traditional Yorùbá epistemologies, cosmologies, and ontologies with broader West/African spiritual technologies and philosophies across the diaspora. They employ ancestral, spiritual, anthropological, and material-based approaches to create devotional objects, works, and spaces that situate themselves within the contemporary as experimental activations of Afrodiasporic memory, meaning, and world-making for envisioning transformative pathways from the future-present-past.
