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Taofique Folarin is an Afro queer Jamaican Nigerian conceptual artist working across photography, moving image, music, sound, painting and mark making. Informed by Yorùbá philosophy, spirituality and psychological inquiry, his practice explores Siloed Intimacy and visual alchemy, engaging with mental health, identity, healing and self actualisation through a queer diasporic lens.
Working intuitively, Folarin documents real time moments before fragmenting, layering and alchemising them through an intentional editing process. His images blur the boundaries between photography and painting, moving between the recognisable and the abstract to give form to emotional, psychological and spiritual states. Editing is not simply a finishing tool, but a fundamental part of his conceptual language, a way of thinking, feeling, discovering and revealing.
Àṣẹ, intuition and transformation run through his practice. Drawing parallels with his Yorùbá heritage, Folarin is interested in what exists beyond the immediately visible and in the potential for art to reveal, transform and heal. His work challenges fixed narratives and refuses the pathologisation of experiences that might instead be understood through cultural, spiritual and psychological frameworks.
Music extends this enquiry through a more direct vehicle for truth. Drawing on lived experience, Folarin uses music and sound to explore HIV stigma, mental health, identity and contemporary issues affecting Black queer and wider communities. Across mediums, his work considers creativity as both personal enquiry and a tool for awareness, dialogue and collective healing.
Rooted in cultural omnivorousness, his practice resists being contained by a single medium or perspective. Alongside his visual and musical practice, Folarin is a writer, actor and activist, with each discipline contributing to an evolving body of work.
Operating under the ethos 〒▲℉, Truth. Authenticity. Freedom, his practice remains in flux, 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.