Mufutau Yusuf's Impasse Uses Dance to Examine the Role of Memory in the Construction of Identity

Mufutau Yusuf, Impasse, image credit Luca Truffarelli:

Mufutau Yusuf is a Nigerian-born Irish choreographer, performer, teacher, and curator, living between Brussels and Ireland. Born in Lagos, he moved to rural Country Meath, outside of Dublin, Ireland, at age nine with his father and discovered contemporary dance at sixteen through the Dublin Youth Dance Company. Raised in a culture where movement and dance are integral to its heritage, Yusuf was drawn to the opportunities in Europe, where he saw the potential to cultivate a professional career in dance.

He later trained at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, and since graduating in 2016, has performed with leading companies such as Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez in Belgium and Liz Roche Company, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Emma Martin/United Fall, and Catherine Young Dance in Ireland. Currently, he is a choreographer-in-residence with Ireland’s National Dance Company, Luail.

Yusuf’s unique voice has earned him a respected place within contemporary dance ecology. His acclaimed piece Òwe—Yoruba for “proverb”—premiered at the Irish Arts Center in 2022. Combining personal and archival materials with immersive visuals, soundscapes, and a blend of traditional and contemporary movement, it is an investigation of identity, particularly of Yusef’s Nigerian roots. 

Sound design is integral to Yusuf’s choreography. In Pigeon, a work that navigates the intersection of language and cultural fusion, he juxtaposes recordings from Nigerian markets with those from Cork’s Moore Street Market, Dublin. 

His recent piece, Impasse, commissioned by Arts Council Ireland, features a soundscape by composer Mick Donohoe, layering abstract sounds, tearing noises, and Bach-inspired compositions. Motivated by Yusuf’s interest in racial and political identity—particularly as it relates to the Black body in contemporary Western contexts—Impasse is a compelling exploration of ethnicity, identity and the experience of the Black diaspora. Delving into questions of representation, misrepresentation, and invisibility Yusef uses the piece to; “further understand my relationship with my Black body and its experiences within a contemporary Western society. This raised questions on the notion of representation, misrepresentation, and lack thereof.”

Mufutau Yusuf, Impasse, image credit Patricio Cassinoni

Performed as a duet with the Congolese dancer, Lukah Katangila, Yusef delves into the role of memory in the construction of identity. Drawing on both his own experiences and those of his collaborator as migrants, he examines themes of assimilation, diversity, and representation, using dance as a medium to explore the complexities of belonging and selfhood. In a 2022 interview with The New York Times he explained “As migrants, you always improvise, attuning yourself to your surroundings, and that comes across in my work.”

Originally premiered at the Dublin Dance Festival 2024, Impasse has since toured across the UK, including a standout appearance at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, where it earned a five-star review from The Guardian as "a piece of magical stagecraft" marking Yusef as "a choreographer to watch." Before its London premiere at Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis Studio on Thursday the 14th and Friday the 15th of November, Yusuf will present Impasse at the Festival Afropolis, QDance Centre in Lagos. 

Mufutau Yusuf, Impasse, image credit Patricio Cassinoni

About Impasse

Creative Team:
Mufutau Yusuf (Junior) – Choreographer / Performer / Set Designer
Lukah Katangila – Performer
Tom Lane – Sound Design & Composer
Mick Donohoe – Composer
Matt Burke – Light Designer
Alison Brown – Costume Design

Maryam Yussuf – Prop Design
Ikenna Anyabuike – Text / Spoken Word
Rima Baransi - Rehearsal Assistant
Lisa Mahony – Production Manager
Lisa Krugel – Stage Manager / Set Assistant 

Mufutau Yusuf, Impasse, image credit Luca Truffarelli:

crosslucid Manifests Human Stories through Artificial Intelligence in Dwellers Between the Waters @ ACUD Galerie in Berlin

‘Dwellers Between the Waters’ (2023) is conjured as a series of hybrid rituals that mediate the space between physical presence, trauma, memory, healing, and virtuality. Polyphonic in its artificially intelligent framework, Dwellers Between the Waters could be experienced as a happening that is chanted by various elemental entities such as waters, winds, earth, air, algorithm... as well as poetry, history, magic, human and more-than-human creatures. This happening of digital rituals questions the singularity of humanist perception of reality. Co-performing with artificial intelligence, it attempts to create alternative epistemologies and outlooks on (so-called) reality through rendering multi-focal narratives and embedding the psycho-magical practice in forms of living ‘sigils’.

Combing artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy, Dwellers Between the Waters seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos, and examines how artificial intelligence, in terms of artistic practice, remains integral to our contemporary condition, that is, the ever-evolving climate crisis and the sixth extinction of species coupled with wars, inflation, and capitalist exploitation. By evoking, cultivating, and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the ‘dwellers’ who inhabit in and among ‘realities’ to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to (so-called) reality as evolving strings materializing across both physical and virtual domains to bring novel perspectives for further changes.

Dwellers Between the Waters is on view through October 8th at ACUD Galerie, Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin.

Augustas Serapinas Excavates Nostalgia from Discarded Houses in Roof from Rūdninkai @ Klosterruine Berlin

 

Augustas Serapinas 
Roof from Rūdninkai (2023)
Installation view Klosterruine Berlin
Photo: Juan Saez

 

For his exhibition Roof from Rūdninkai, Augustas Serapinas produces a new expansive sculpture that takes its point of departure in a deserted house in rural Lithuania. The artist continues exploring his interest in questions of how space is constituted, how it reflects lived realities, and what memories are inscribed in it. Serapinas often finds the material for his sculptural interventions through online classified ads, where entire houses are given away on the condition that all materials be removed from the owners’ property. From these discarded materials he reconstructs sometimes recognizable objects such as a roof or a wall, sometimes more abstract artworks that open into a dialogue with the history of minimal art. In contrast to the use of anonymous industrial materials, Serapinas’s wooden elements and shingles bear clear markers of history, place, and use.

Roof from Rūdninkai is on view through September 17th at Klosterruine Berlin, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin.

Lost Narratives Are Excavated As A Form of Restitution in The Struggle of Memory @ PalaisPopulaire in Berlin

As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The artists in this exhibition are concerned with remembering, reconstructing, reimagining, and restoring. Part 1 of The Struggle of Memory focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting artworks that probe in different ways how the body absorbs, processes, stores, and recalls experiences. Part 2 explores how memories are inscribed, bringing together artworks that draw our attention to the traces of history in the natural and built environment while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past. The show, curated by Kerryn Greenberg, features work by Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, Samuel Fosso, Anawana Haloba, Mohamed Camara, Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Part 1 is on view through September 18th; part 2 is on view October 6th through March 11th at PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin.

Alexis Soul-Gray Peers Through the Looking-Glass in Immutable Fragments @ Bel Ami

Images courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Paul Salveson.

Bel Ami presents Immutable Fragments, Alexis Soul-Gray’s first solo-exhibition in the United States. Like Lewis Carroll’s journey through the looking glass, Soul-Gray shows how curiosity and experimentation peel back hidden layers, revealing the emotional life of childhood and how it conditions our perceptions and responses into adulthood.

Appropriating photographic imagery of mid-to-late 20th century family life from popular British magazines and books, Soul-Gray finds clichéd tableaus of women and children, choosing them for their artificial quality, “where family is often faked but also, somehow felt.” She then delicately draws out eerie moments that seem unexpectedly real, for example, a backward glance or a playful gesture. For this exhibition, Soul-Gray sources illustrations from fairy tales and the nostalgic imagery of advertising, designed to invoke in the consumer their own desires and fears. These images function as screen memories, referring to Sigmund Freud’s concept of a falsified image that stands in for an experience too disturbing to recall.

Immutable Fragments is on view through September 9 @ Bel Ami, 709 N Hill St. #103 & #105, Los Angeles

 
 

Simone Fattal: Works and Days @ the New York MOMA

Simone Fattal: Works and Days brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including ancient history, mythology, Sufi poetry, geopolitical conflicts, and landscape painting. Fattal’s work explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archaeology and excavation, constructing a world that has emerged from history and memory. Both timeless and specific, Fattal’s work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic.

Simone Fattal: Works and Days is on view through September 2 at MOMA 11 West 53 Street. photographs courtesy of MOMA