Instagram @aylineolukman
Ayline Olukman
FRANCE
Ayline Olukman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores vulnerability, the unconscious, and wandering. She works with photography, painting, writing, and drawing. A graduate of the École des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2005, she alternated between studio practice and extensive travels, which she sees as research phases. After a residency at Point B in Brooklyn in 2013, she lived and worked in New York until 2018. Her work has since gained international recognition: finalist of the Voies-Off Prize in Arles (2018), winner of the Verzasca Foto Festival (2019, Switzerland), and nominee for the Freelens Mentor Award (2020). Several of her photobooks have been acclaimed, including La Mue (2019, PH Museum Best Books) and Elysian Fields (2021). Her latest projects include Un jardin secret (2023), Idyll (New York, 2024), and Nos vies sauvages (2024).
• SERIES •
Our Wild Lives
Our Wild Lives unfolds as a poetic reflection on the vulnerability of existence. Through a sensitive staging of living beings, the series establishes an intimate dialogue between corporeal forms—human, animal—and the elements of nature.
In this dreamlike universe, the body seems to dissolve into matter (stones, foliage, clouds, liquid elements…), until it becomes one with it. Within this subtle fusion arises a feeling of desire, an aspiration to belong to a broader, more ancient order of life.
The figure is not conceived as an isolated subject, but as a medium of expression, bearing a language where gestures and textures intertwine. From this perspective, Our Wild Lives opens a liminal space in which the human being, far from exercising control over nature, becomes receptive to its otherness, to its discreet yet insistent presence and, in doing so, gains an expanded awareness of their own condition within the living world.
