Art Metropole

#15755

better in my dreams

Artist

Christina Oyawale

Price

$40.00

Date

2024

Publisher

Christina Oyawale

Format

Zines

Genre

Poetry, Photography, Disability and Chronic I, Environment

“better in my dreams” is the debut poetry and photograph zine collection by Toronto artist, writer, and curator Christina Oyawale. Showcasing a series of prose and (un)ordinary thoughts, Oyawale writes about platonic and romantic love from an anarchist perspective; reflective on the uninhibited nature of their navigations of gender and sexuality. Like a stream of consciousness that sometimes gets in its own way, Oyawale attempts to find a silver lining through the magic of natural landscapes and sexual euphoria. Notes and thoughts on disability, ecologies, sexuality, kinship, loss, yearning, and ageing.

Bio:
Christina Oyawale is a self-proclaimed “anarchist punk boy” and emerging multi-hyphenate artist, graphic designer, researcher + curator based in Tkaronto. Oyawale holds a BFA in Photography from The School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. Working with film, photography, and text, they use memories, shared Black feminist history, and knowledge sharing in order to create work that emphasizes curiosity of learning and documenting the importance of slowness. Currently, they are attempting to break free from the expected and frequent uses of identity politics under our current neo-liberalist society that requires marginalized people to sell their identity in exchange for “visibility” in the art world and academia.

Their work and research attempts to foster communal conversation surrounding capitalism, anti-Black racism, queer-/trans-phobia, and ableism. Many of these socio-political conditions that they believe we should be fighting to dismantle. Their current research interests and musings surround: Social Reproduction Theory, the works of Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, queer USSR, and Black feminist disability theory.