Mowalola Launches Her Anarchic London Exhibition With the Help of Skepta and Yves Tumor – Vogue

At the beginning of Mowalola Ogunlesis first runway show, staged back in January as part of Londons Fashion East incubator program, a tannoy call repeated Mowalola over a throbbing electro beat and pulsing, strobe-like lights. It was a bold statement of intent: establishing from the get-go the culture clash that fostered her creative outlook, and her place at the center of it. The eye-popping colors, treated leathers, and spray-painted patterns harkened back to her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria, while the boys with exposed chests in hip-skimming bumsters and girls in dangerously low-cut tops placed it smack bang in todays London. The flamboyant, sexed-up outfits arent just about provocation, either: they reflect the pageantry of the British capitals burgeoning club nights for queer people of color that Ogunlesi found herself immersed in after moving to the city from a boarding school in the Surrey countryside at 18.

And while this story of cultural cross-pollination is very much Ogunlesis to tell, with her first exhibition, titled Silent Madness, shes opening up the infectious energy of this nocturnal hedonism to a wider audience. I was an artist before I was a designer, and Ive always wanted to make something bigger than just a runway show, says Ogunlesi of the exhibition, which opened on Friday at NOW Gallery in Greenwich, London. When I had this opportunity, I knew I wanted to make my own version of a Renaissance painting, but in real life. For the installations premise, I started with the three things that inspire me most: music, film, and people. And then I just created the idea of Silent Madness, this sense that somethings happening around you, but you dont know what it is, its just chaotic.

While her past collections have involved plenty of teamworknotably with South African photographer Lea Colombo, whose erotic images were screen printed onto the backs of leather jackets, and stylist Ib KamaraSilent Madnesss riotous, multimedia spectacle features more ambitious collaborations. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a punk band of mannequins with nails studded into their skulls, wearing bodysuits covered in the signature Mowalola print of stenciled spray paint, and their instruments covered in sludgy black tar. (Produced with set designer Thomas Petherick, the psychedelic patterns speak to her time at Central Saint Martins, where Ogunlesi specialized in textile design.)

Across the space, video screens flicker with hellish visions of writhing bodies captured in brash, solarized color, as if filmed through an infrared lens; the footage was produced in collaboration with photographer and Comme des Garons collaborator Jordan Hemingway and art director Jamie Andrew Reid. Another film, directed by filmmaker Aidan Zamiri, sees Ogunlesi herself with claw-like fingernails scream and give the fish-eye camera the middle fingerrecalling one of the sinister sirens from a 90s Hype Williams music videobefore stomping her kitten heels over a willing male victim. Its as dangerous and subversively sexy as it sounds.

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Mowalola Launches Her Anarchic London Exhibition With the Help of Skepta and Yves Tumor - Vogue