Commissioned as part of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal celebrations
May 28, 2021
66 Portland Place
London W1B 1AD
United Kingdom
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has commissioned the artist, scholar and choreographer Adesola Akinleye to create a series of new video artworks inspired by the work of Sir David Adjaye OBE as part of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal celebrations. The videos are now available to watch on the RIBA Youtube channel.
Akinleye’s pieces respond to a prevalent theme throughout Adjaye’s practice, that of memory, through videos that convey how memories of specific places keep us connected to the sites that we have been physically separated from during the pandemic. The videos invite viewers to be fully present in a cathartic experience that will temporarily take you outside of yourself to share in Akinleye’s multilayered assemblage of memories.
Akinleye recollects a number of sites that remain important to her and therefore form part of her identity despite their distance from the location of her home. She remembers the presence of her body in different places and conveys this through a layering of imagery, movement and sound that playfully celebrates the glitch in the Zoom background algorithm. Shot entirely at home, Akinleye reflects on the past year of isolation within the confines of our domestic interiors, and suggests recognising shared experiences of specific buildings can form a collective memory that holds us together as a society.
About the Royal Gold Medal
The Royal Gold Medal has been awarded annually since 1848 and is recognized as the UK’s highest honour for architecture. The award is approved personally by Her Majesty The Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence "either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture.” The 2021 recipient of the award is Sir David Adjaye OBE.
About the artist:
Dr Adesola Akinleye, FHEA, FRSA is a choreographer artist-scholar. She is founder and currently co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab. Over the past 20 years she has created dance works ranging from live performance that is often site-specific and involves a cross-section of the community, to dance films, installations, and texts. Akinleye’s work is characterized by an interest in voicing people’s lived-experiences in Place(s) through creative, moving portraiture. Her latest book Dance, Architecture and Engineering (dance in dialogue) was published in April 2021 by Bloomsbury.
