Okiki Akinfe: “I’m trying to find the bite”

In 1965, the boundaries of London were redrawn to envelop various towns clinging to the edges of the city including Romford, Dagenham and Upminster. For Okiki Akinfe and writer Billy Parker, the legacy of this bending of borders left a lasting sense of existing in geographical and ideological limbo: an experience that makes up one of the many facets of Akinfe’s complex, layered work.

In her first solo exhibition ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ at Ginny on Frederick, Akinfe offers kaleidoscopic “windows into a manoeuvring place”. Burying expansive ideas of identity under thin construction lines, Akinfe’s ‘deconstructivism’ warrants a structural theatricality: her painting’s battle with excess and sparsity create a visual depth that reaches outward, enveloping the viewer. In this conversation, Okiki and Billy discuss how the artist creates a world built atop a robust knowledge of art history and technical mastery – made purposefully difficult to enter – and how she throws bones to the viewer as cryptic pops of niche British culture.

Billy Parker: I’ve known your work for so long but we’ve never had…

Okiki Akinfe: …an actual conversation.

BP: No, I’ve always been so intrigued.

OA: I like that. I like the mysteriousness of people. They see me, they know stuff about me. And in the work, they see the link.

BP: I feel you don’t always let people come and see it.

OA: Oh yeah, I don’t let people in my studio.

BP: Which I love. I feel very privileged.

OA: You are. My studio feels like my bedroom.

BP: Did you used to work in your bedroom?

OA: When I was younger I was allowed to draw and paint on my walls. I remember a friend of mine saying “we will all become artists because we couldn’t afford posters from HMV”.

BP: Your work is heavy in historical references. Is it direct?

OA: Not direct, physical references but I do think the paintings have a ‘how to make a painting’ vibe. Sometimes people get lost behind the aesthetic – they can’t see what’s behind: something not sinister, but lurking, emerging.  I love this atmospheric gloom. The rabbit itself is referencing historic still life paintings but it’s also stretched.

BP: Digitally almost. Is that a dirty word for you: ‘digitally?’

OA: No because digital elements like cameras and photography are clearly a big part of art making. I sketch it all with proper measurements. That’s where the lines come in; they’re actually me measuring stuff out. Traditionally I would do this in chalk and wipe it back, but I like keeping it there in a Euan Uglow way.

BP: The construction lines mean the image is attached to the structure of the canvas rather than becoming part of it.

OA: You know when you go past a building [under construction] and they have scaffolding – they put the stuff on top to be like ‘this is what’s going to be here, underneath’.

BP: I love ‘shitty’ imagery. You do bring it in, for example, in your painting with the Essex girl flag.

OA: I hope it’s somewhat comical-satirical. This painting is based on a game from school called Scramble but the actual physical painting is based on a cartoon dust cloud. There are historical references but a lot are just genuine fun parts of my childhood. This stance is referencing the female loading character screens because when I was younger I used to play a lot of Street Fighter and World Combat. The stances were always ass up in the air and you’re like “yeah she’s gonna win”. I like open interpretations. I think it’s so unique to what I’m actually thinking about that people don’t get it on the first go.

BP: I remember once being a bit stoned. [Okiki laughs]. I was alone at home and you’d posted a painting that came up on my Instagram and suddenly it…

OA: …It made sense!

BP: Suddenly I understood all of the deconstruction.

OA: I love that.

BP: I love that it took me so long for that to click. I couldn’t work out how to enter it and then it was all just…

OA: …there. They’re not meant to be easy to read. I’m very aware, and play into, the fact that  a painting with historical and Renaissance motifs will be read in a European-centric, academic-like, Freudian-esque way.

BP: I wanted to read this [Scramble] as a historical war painting.

OA: There’s an element of smoke in that. Presenting my childhood as something that deserves the same significance as a historical painting.

BP: I’m sure there’s a lot we’ve over-analysed that’s actually just taking the piss.

OA: Even Mozart’s songs. He has one that’s about poop jokes. There are letters where he’s written poetry about farts. You’re thinking this guy’s really intelligent but he’s also writing to his cousin being like, “yeah farts”.

BP: Most intelligent people are also really funny.

OA: Have you heard that intelligent people love reality shows? I watched TOWIE last night… I think of it as art research.

BP: It’s social research.

OA: It’s so meta. They’re watching themselves watch the first couple of the episodes. I like the fourth wall breaking, reparsing on stuff with new eyes.

BP: Are you trying to trick yourself?

OA: Yes. Hopefully that creates this ‘double look’ effect.

BP: I’ve just seen that slider.

OA: [laughs] The Adidas slider is based on my own. I like little references that make it unique or contemporary. That tie is based on my old school tie. Two paintings have me wearing Nike socks. I like the socks because they feel real.

BP: I’m assuming it’s a sock that’s half off?

OA: It’s literally how I wear my socks in the house before I fully take them off. I think it’s how dancers wear them?

BP: It looks like a ‘study’. Does it function more than that?

OA: There’s religious context. It’s called Peter because in Judaism and Christianity, Peter means rock. But it’s also contrapposto: this idea of beauty in symmetry, a straight leg and then a popped hip. I realised I could do it with a foot. It’s also a study of how much can I add or remove before it’s doing too much. I’m trying to find the bite. A lot of my work is a conversation between finished and complete.

BP: How do you deal with that boundary?

OA: I’ve marked out a whole painting and literally gone, “oh I’ve fucked it”. It’s a lot of listening to your intuition, questioning what feels heavy. Sometimes paintings aren’t heavy enough, so I need something completely on the other side. It can be balanced with a colour.

BP: You can tell that you enjoy the actual painting process.

OA: A good painting has physical strain, where you can see the painter’s really trying to fight with it, and figure out how to render something. You can see the thinking happening. They don’t always do what I want them to do. I’m being such a dictator. I keep thinking that when I’m 70, there are just going to be lines. I’m going to go full abstract. We can do another interview when I’m 70 and see how it goes.

BP: I hope I’m still knocking about.

OA: We’ll be here. Still doing parties.

BP: What’s the importance of text for you?

OA: The text for my MA show was called ‘How We Caught the Chicken Flu’, which detailed the history of chicken and chips in the UK. I was referencing chicken shops becoming ‘third spaces’ for young people. Over the last two decades the government has gotten rid of social youth groups, which I used to go to when I was younger. I was using the text as a metaphor to talk about this loss of community. I had a painting that had a Dixie sign in it: it was nice to see this specific mark of British culture [in painting]. I had a studio visit where I was explaining to an American what a chicken and chip shop was. That was fun. The fact that it was a part of an art history conversation. The text for this show is based on Scramble. The more you read it, the more it becomes a conversation about free school dinners.

BP: I had free school dinners.

OA: I didn’t have free school dinners because we weren’t in that ‘bracket’. There’s this whole thing of not being poor enough to catch it. You have to send stuff, benefits you’re on and pay cuts. It could be the difference between a couple hundred you get per month.

BP: I was embarrassed that I was on free school dinners but my mum was a single parent and couldn’t have done it otherwise.

OA: A large majority of the kids I went to school with had free school dinners. They had a voucher system.

BP: So did we. You had to flash your neon yellow voucher…

OA: And people would be like “you’re poor”. Dammnn. They got rid of it in my school at some point. I remember the woman in the office saying the school couldn’t afford it anymore as the kids weren’t paying back on time. It’s hard to enforce something that is dependent on a kid and not necessarily the parent so it becomes sticky. Scramble is a unique part of British experience. I thought it was a very East London-Essex thing.

BP: I don’t know Scramble and my school was very geographically close to yours.

OA: People from North and South East London have heard of it. It’s a game that has a weird prank element. It happens by surprise: someone will shout the word ‘scramble’ and throw a coin in the air, then everyone will scramble to find it. If you win you get money for lunch, or, someone was telling me that in their school, whoever won would get the KFC snack box and share it with their friends. The more I had conversations about it, the more I realised it was very specific to different areas of London. Economic factors seem to play a big part. It happens in schools where free dinners are prevalent. I have never heard of Scramble in a private or grammar school. It’s similar to a game called Pennies Up, a historic gambling game. There are references to it during World War Two and even Ancient Greece. It’s such a specific thing that when I do mention it, and someone knows what it is, I instantly know that they understand a part of my life.

BP: The cows are making me laugh now.

OA: Have I told you where the cows come from? This painting is called She’s an absolute cow!, because people did say that!

BP: It slips out of me sometimes now. My friends hate it because obviously it’s really misogynistic.

OA: I would never think someone was calling me a [physical] cow. I’d see it as this weird, respectful, mean insult. In Freshers I kept having this weird experience where people were reacting to me saying I’m from London or Essex.

BP: I still get this now. If I say I’m from Essex, they say that’s London. If I say I’m from London they say that’s Essex.

OA: Or people asking if I had a zip card. Yes!? I did have a zip card.

BP: Yeah, I got red buses to school!?

OA: One girl asked me if we had farms and cows? She’s imagining somewhere very rural. I was looking for a visual identifier for my work: something very specific that ties into all the theology and that sentence came up. The whole point is that the paintings hit these different layers of my experience: a Venn diagram of parts of me growing up. These two paintings say ‘tender’ and the other one, the end of ‘tender and tasty’: they’re based on the Favourites chicken boxes. It feels like archiving a specific part of British experience. I don’t see Favourites chicken anymore.

BP: It’s such a weird, complex identity. I’ve kind of abandoned it.

OA: I’m kind of coming back for it.

BP: You’re exploring it. I never felt grounded or settled within it.

OA: Two years ago after graduating, I went to the Gas Foundation residency in Lagos. That was the first time I felt this perfect combination of being British and Nigerian. Lagos is the highest populated city in Africa. The liveness and dense population means there are so many different economic groups and classes of people who have had such unique experiences. I was understood. I didn’t have to explain anything. I already understood so much of Nigerian culture and understand a fair bit of pidgin English. I found it very easy to maneuver and I feel like the paintings have that experience of manoeuvring too. Even in the text, one or two lines have references to pidgin English. Someone who doesn’t understand it wouldn’t get the ‘throwaway’ sentence, but those who do will pick up on it. Things are slowly emerging and being pulled back. The paintings are windows into this ‘manoeuvring place’. I like when work feels like it’s not performing for an audience but rather you’re peering in…

BP: It’s a live entity that’s ‘happening’.

OA: Then you’re inferring or reading from it. That’s when I like the little nods – things that slowly welcome you in. The outright Essex Girl stuff is fun because it’s full on straight away. I made a postcard that said RM13 Babes, which I love.

BP: RMbabes4ever.

OA: It’s these little shout outs.

BP: I can enter through that part, which means I can then accept the other parts that I can’t instantly relate to.

OA: Sometimes you just need someone to count you in.

BP: I feel lucky that we have that shared experience, which means I can get in!

OA: We have such a uniquely specific…

BP: I know…

OA: I do not often meet Essex people, but I do think they are slowly emerging in the art world.

BP: I know, they’re coming…

OA: Art sometimes has this thing where it’s propping up certain conversations that I feel very excluded from.

BP: Me too.

OA: A lot of my work when I first started didn’t include figures. I thought more about it when I got into art school and realised I do not see black bodies anywhere in paintings. During Black History Month they’re scrambling: “Let’s get this one back up from the archive”. There’s a gap. I’m glad there are more people filling this gap and it feels authentic. I remember in my foundation year going to a lecture that was two or three hours long about the colour blue in Giotto’s work. And I was like…

BP: To be fair, the colour blue in his work is a thing…

OA: It’s a big thing. It was’s very hard to get lapis [lazuli]. That’s a big conversation but…

BP: We’ve heard it all before.

OA: You can talk about import and the Silk Road and how that all ties in together and yes, the blue is beautiful. But at the same time, how long can we do this? I would love someone to do a three-hour lecture on the importance of being from Essex in a painting, or the importance of being from Essex in Nigeria.

BP: Which you’re doing!!

OA: Artist interviews can be very art history focussed, but when I talk to artists, they’ll be the funniest conversations – for example Sex In The City, which I’m sure informs a lot of people’s practice!

BP: People try to pretend everything’s theoretical and academic, but actually people are just painting memes and reality TV.

OA: All art is concept art. I couldn’t get that HMV poster so… Did we all not draw One Direction?

BP: I actually drew Jessie J.

OA: Oh, that’s so sweet. That’s so Essex-y, actually. When Essex people enter the media, they have this weird ‘Diana’ effect.

BP: I think it’s that, “someone’s made it”.

OA: I’m sure the same thing kind of happens with people from the North as well. It feels different seeing a normal person on TV. There’s a redirection in work referencing home, the idea of archiving experience, especially for people of colour. I’m noticing a lot of black artists are working with this, not necessarily identity, but showcasing this experience for people who don’t see themselves in that part of the art world. There’s a lot of masking, a lot of ‘Hannah Montana-ing’. Even within my own Nigerian self, there are parts of me, like jokes, that aren’t really hitting. Sometimes the art world has a bit of a blah, kind of generic-ness to it: we all are just functioning. If I can’t do it, at least my work can.

BP: But that’s powerful because that’s how you start opening up that space. Can we talk about bodies? I’ve noticed you never really paint people’s heads.

OA: And I don’t paint people looking directly at the audience. I have one painting where that happens. I think the paintings are giving the figures their privacy, especially when I’m painting a lot of black female figures, I don’t want there to be a strong sexualisation of them, not in a way that’s taking power from the form. So I have the figure turning away – you’re being invited to have a peak, but not here for the full show. There’s a whole lexicon of my own artwork which I’m very adamant in documenting. I want it to feel like I’m being respectful to the work itself. When you’re using strong imagery, there is always someone who can see the work and not want to be displayed like that.

BP: You have so much control over your work, which is quite rare.. It’s nice that the humour powers it forward, instead of the theory.

OA: At the end of the day, it all starts with curiosity. The more building blocks you have, the easier it gets to understand. Building the foundation of your practice takes time.

BP: What’s been so illuminating from this conversation is that you’re clearly tackling a lot of complicated stuff. Most people feel the need to display that and be like, “look at all this stuff I’m dealing with and investigating!!”

OA: I read [books]!

BP: I know you said it’s not always for the audience’s enjoyment, but you do seem to want people to enjoy your work.

OA: I’m glad that comes through because painting is quite selfish. I feel very fortunate that people like the paintings. But I do think, like, come on, not everyone wants the most boring… You would be surprised at the amount of artists who are flirting with gallerists and you don’t know.

BP: No, they all are. They’re all doing it. That’s all it is.

OA: Realistically, everyone would date a gallerist if we could.

BP: Absolutely.

OA: The right gallerist…

BP: It’s a shame not all of them are hot. But when there is a hot one…

OA: I’m sure everyone’s met some hot gallerist from some gallery in Milan that doesn’t really exist…

BP: Yeah…

OA: And we’ve all thought about it. So, if you see me do it…. Catch me on The Daily Mail.

BP: I would love to be on The Daily Mail…

OA: That’s what I mean! Low-key, I make jokes all the time: six months after my solo you’re going to see on The Daily Mail, walking down the road hiding under a hat, with a gallery tote and a Birkin bag.

BP: And I’ll be in Essex screaming “she’s made it!!!”. Woo! [clicks].

OA: With a t-shirt that says I heart Essex. Come on… Who doesn’t love that?