Bunmi Agusto
Artist · Lagos
Inside Within, a world where braids grow like roots and reality, mythology and imagination share the same ground. Four questions, one glimpse into Bunmi’s universe.
“I’ve essentially been trying to draw sound and experimenting with how to depict harmony and syncopation.”
Introducing the second chapter of our monthly SÉLONE series, celebrating women who are shaping culture through their own worlds, practices and points of view.
Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Bunmi Agusto is an artist, writer and world-builder whose practice explores the space between reality, mythology and imagination.
Drawing on her Yoruba, Edo and Afro-Brazilian heritage, Bunmi has long been fascinated by magical storytelling, folklore and the unseen. Her work is deeply rooted in research, exploring the histories, beliefs and shared truths behind mythical narratives across different cultures. Through her essays, she investigates these connections, bringing together cultural history, spirituality and imagination.
At the centre of her practice is Within, an imagined universe that reflects the world inside her mind. Here, hair becomes a central visual language. Braids grow from the ground like roots, forming trees, landscapes and pathways. Beyond its physical form, hair carries cultural significance, connecting ideas of identity, heritage and belonging to the natural world.
Through her work, Bunmi brings together different cultural influences, allowing reality and fantasy, the personal and the collective, to exist within the same world.
A world rooted in heritage, yet constantly growing beyond it.
1. Your work often turns memories, dreams, mythology and real-life experiences into the world of Within. What has been finding its way into that world lately, and what can fantasy express for you that reality sometimes can’t?
I’ve actually been making abstract works for the first time. It’s informed by my research into music’s capacity to induce trance-like states in some myths and religious ceremonies.
So I’ve essentially been trying to draw sound and experimenting with how to depict harmony and syncopation.
2. Hair plays such a structural role in Within, almost becoming the nervous system of the world, while braids and cornrows also carry cultural and visual references. When you encounter the symbolism of hair across other cultures and mythologies, do you find unexpected parallels with the meanings you’ve built into your own world?
Definitely. Across several cultures, both the head and hair itself holds significant importance for a person. One or both are often seen to determine one’s destiny or goodwill, because they are seen as potent access points to a person’s psyche or soul.
This is why using hair as this underlying root network informing what happens above ground is so present in my work.
3. Your work draws from your Yoruba, Edo and Afro-Brazilian heritage while also building an entirely imagined world of your own. How do cultural memory and inherited histories enter Within, and how do you transform them through imagination?
Some of these influences happen rather organically in my work because it is within those frameworks that reality was constructed for me growing up. I learnt some of the more specific histories in academic contexts, but they all bleed into the work and inform my colour palettes, motifs, geometry, and the general underlying mechanics of my world-building.
There are also contemporary culture references such as the fashion brands my subjects wear.
4. Who would be your Woman of the Month, a woman whose work, way of thinking or presence inspires you, and why?
Debbie Allen. I recently watched the first fourteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and the reboot of A Different World and have been re-introduced to Debbie Allen’s greatness as a storyteller, performer, a world-builder in her own right.
