VILLAGER (b. A. Adekunle Adaranijo), they/them, is a Nigerian-born Contemporary Transdisciplinary Artist, Cultural Producer, and African Spirituality Practitioner who oscillates between painting, collage, sculpture, performance, experimental film, installation, curation, and cultural facilitation, actively mapping and querying the intersections of material memory & intelligence, Yorùbá knowledge production, and postcolonial African identity as an evolving interconnected topography of critical inquiry. VILLAGER's practice, which is deeply informed by their migration from Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S. in 2013, also explores and traces the relationality between objects, bodies, and spaces by excavating their phenomenological possibilities and elucidating their spiritual, ancestral, formal, sensory, social, cultural, and political significances beyond linear narratives. 

Taking direction from the luminary writing of African Scholars like Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor, VILLAGER's transdisciplinary research practice unfolds as a ritualistic discursive network of wayfinding that queries and maps the construction, transmission, and transformation of "tradition"—the evolution and dissemination of culture, history, identity, consciousness, and belonging as it slips and strengthens through the contours of time, spirit, place, memory, and material. Through this studio inquiry, they are interested in uncovering and challenging the rather sublime, confluent, and often contradictory forces that shape tradition & the ways in which we 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, drawing on ancestral, spiritual, anthropological, and material-based approaches by creating devotional object/work/spaces that situate them within their contemporary transmissions in a deep activation of Afrodiasporic memory, meaning, and world-making which forges transformative pathways from the future-present-past.