Store
Taofique Folarin is an Afro-queer Jamaican–Nigerian conceptual artist whose practice spans photography, moving image, sound and mark-making. Informed by Yorùbá philosophy, spirituality and psychological inquiry, his work explores mental health, identity, healing and self-actualisation through a queer diasporic lens.
Working intuitively, he creates works that blur the boundaries between photography and painting. Folarin approaches editing as an exploration of emotional, psychological and spiritual languages, forming a fundamental conceptual framework.
His practice challenges fixed narratives, refuses pathologisation and remains exploratory, rooted in cultural omnivorousness.
Alongside his artistic practice, Folarin is also a writer, actor and activist.
Operating under the ethos 〒▲℉, Truth. Authenticity. Freedom, his practice exists in flux and contributes to his living body of work, evolving, responsive, and intentional. Each creation is an act of inquiry.
Taofique’s work is process-oriented and non-linear. Creation develops naturally rather than towards fixed results, guided by subconscious intuition and a divinely inspired sensibility. He works across photography, moving image, sound, performance and mark-making, often beginning with personal or self-produced material that is fragmented, layered and reworked.
Mental health shapes both the content of the work and the way it is made. Taofique explores the self through art as a personal cosmology, mapping inner experience in relation to the wider world. Spirituality and psychology exist alongside one another, informed by his own spiritual experiences and an ongoing process of healing and becoming.
Editing is central to this process. Rather than treating it as a finishing tool, Taofique uses editing as a way of thinking and feeling. He works intuitively, allowing images, sensations and impulses to surface from the unconscious before altering, obscuring and recomposing what appears. Recognisable images shift into something less certain; a blurred spiritual emergence, soulful in essence.
Across image, sound and performance, emotional, psychological and spiritual states take form without being simplified or fully resolved. The work moves between what is seen and what is felt, inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface and encounter inner life, identity and spiritual experience without fixed interpretation.