Through collage, memory and intimate observation, the Nigerian-Irish artist explores migration, identity and the quiet realities of diasporic life.
11 June 2026
In ‘Race and Class in Contemporary Ireland’, Nigerian-Irish artist Fiyin Oluokun turns to the intimacy of everyday life to explore how identity is shaped across borders, communities and domestic spaces. Through layered photomontages that combine poetry, texture and found imagery, Oluokun reflects on the experiences of the Nigerian diaspora in County Kildare, moving between humour and vulnerability, ritual and performance. In this interview, the artist speaks about collage as a language of suggestion, the emotional realities of migration, and imagining futures where Black life exists beyond explanation.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Your work focuses on small, everyday gestures. How do these moments help you explore race and class in Ireland?
Fiyin Oluokun: A lot of the time, when race and class are discussed, it’s viewed on this massive scale and fails to humanise people who are marginalised by these things. I find focusing on these smaller gestures is an easy way to explore larger topics.
Image courtesy of the artist
You centre the Nigerian diaspora in County Kildare. How do you balance telling personal stories with speaking to a wider community?
It’s kind of funny, I find the more specific I get with my personal stories, the more it resonates with my wider community. While someone may not have experienced the exact moment of having their parents put vaseline on their forehead, the ritual of getting ready for school and performing these cleanliness rituals is universal, especially for black youth.
You use collage to layer poetry, images and texture. What does this approach allow you to express about migration and identity?
I love collage as a medium because it allows me to suggest things without necessarily being too prescriptive. I can add patterns that are very typical for Yoruba people or be really suggestive of how people interact with each other. I think as a black artist, it can be easy to be too overt with what my work means as a way of translating it to a non-black audience, but I find collage helps me be a little obscure. It feels as though black people are in on the joke in a way, the joke being how we move within our identity.
There is humour in the work, even when dealing with serious themes. How do you use humour as a way to engage difficult subjects?
Humour is often a way of rounding the edges of something that is true but also abrasive. I like to point out absurdity in my work; I think it’s fun, but it also gives me pause and makes me question why things are the way they are.
The home appears as a space of both care and financial responsibility. How does class show up in these domestic scenes?
Again, I’m really drawn to these small moments that humanise people. Class in domestic spaces is not just a statistic – the number of people in direct provision or council estates. Sometimes it’s diluting the off-brand washing-up liquid.
Religion and superstition appear throughout the work. How do these belief systems shape diasporic life in your images?
Growing up in a Nigerian Pentecostal church, I always found it really interesting how much Nigerian, specifically Yoruba culture, is infused with the Pentecostal liturgy. Sometimes the lines between culture and religion get blurred, and for some people, that’s where a part of their identity lies. Observing a very embodied and distinctly Nigerian mode of worship has influenced me a ton. For example, my Nigerian family really avoids ‘speaking negative things into existence’, and so, whenever someone is sick, my family would say that they are ‘strong’. I imagine scenes of a pastor with a handkerchief, an aunt sobbing with a Herculean, infirm person wedged in between.
Your work looks at identity as something shaped across different places. How has your own experience influenced this idea?
I grew up in an immigrant house and in a Nigerian Pentecostal church. At the same time, I went to a very mixed primary and secondary school and then a predominantly white university. While there wasn’t an overt dissonance between these realities, I observed how differently these worlds were, how differently I acted in these spaces and how the latter felt like a performance. Though this performance definitely has influenced my idea of identity, it doesn’t interest me all that much because it centres on the external that’s being witnessed. For me, how black mothers interact with their children, how heteronormative black couples deal with migration, and how my brothers interact with older Nigerian people are what I find worth exploring in terms of identity and place.
Connection is a key theme in the exhibition. What kinds of relationships or futures are you hoping to imagine through this work?
I imagine a future where black people are unburdened by external gazes, not performing or having to translate for others. Just existing and not having to be contextualised.
This exhibition is available to view on Autograph’s online gallery.
