Ayline Olukman: A Summertime Odyssey

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Ayline Olukman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work addresses the notion of the unconscious, humanity and wandering. She uses photography, painting, writing and drawing.

Born in Strasbourg, France in 1981, she graduated from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2005. Between 2006 and 2015, Ayline Olukman alternated between periods of work in her studio in Strasbourg and trips, which she considered like phases of research to photograph and write.

From this period resulted in exhibitions in France, and also in New York, Brussels, Basel, London, Gothenburg, Shanghai or Istanbul and the publication of two books published by Médiapop, Small Eternity (2012) and America (2015), which combine texts and photographs. After a residency in 2015 at Point B in Brooklyn, she settled and worked in New York until 2018. In June 2018 she was nominated as a Voies-Off finalist at the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles. In October 2018, she participated in the residency of the International Art Center of Shangjin in China. She won the Prize of the Verzasca Foto Festival 2019 (Switzerland), where she is exhibited. Her third book, La Mue, published in 2019, is selected among the best photo books 2019 by the PH Museum. In 2020 she was nominated by Freelens for the Mentor Prize. In 2021, she will have a position as a photographer at the Chamber and the HEAR in Strasbourg. Her fourth book, Elysian Fields, was published in November 2021 by Mediapop Editions.

On the road or by immersing the body in the natural elements, the accompanying series speaks of the desire for freedom. "I wanted to make visual the fluid energy of nature that constitutes us and which also constitutes space and memories. For over fifteen years, I have been doing experimental work on images. I don't have a predefined protocol. Empirically and intuitively, I choose to invent a new narration for each work from my photographs transferred to canvas, then reinterpreted in color with paint and glaze. We follow a woman in a road movie that she creates for herself, a contemporary epic of a world filled with nostalgia that she appropriates.

The body is alive, exalted by the sensations of water, sun and air on the skin. It is a way of communicating that is pre verbal: the painting is sensual, it’s about intimacy. It’s a desire to connect to something that feels both personal as well as eternal."