Special Mention 2025
AYLINE OLUKMAN
“ Our Wild Lifes ”
Ayline Olukman
France
Ayline Olukman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores notions of vulnerability, the unconscious, and wandering. She works with photography, painting, writing, and drawing.
Between 2006 and 2015, Ayline Olukman alternated between periods of studio work in Strasbourg and travels, which she considered research phases for photography and writing. After a residency in 2013 at Point B in Brooklyn, she settled and worked in New York until 2018. In June 2018, she was a finalist for the Voies-Off Award at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. In October 2018, she took part in the Shangjin International Art Center in China. She won the 2019 Verzasca Foto Festival (Switzerland), where her work was exhibited.
Her third book, La Mue, published in 2019, was selected among the best photobooks of the year by PH Museum. In 2020, she was nominated by Freelens for the Mentor Award. Her fourth book, Elysian Fields, was published in November 2021 by Médiapop Editions; it retraces her fifteen years of work as a painter. In April 2023, she inaugurated the exhibition Un jardin secret at the Maison des Douanes in Saint-Palais-sur-Mer. In April 2024, she presented her solo exhibition Idyll at the Nicolas Auvray Gallery in New York. In September 2024, her fifth book Our Wild Lives was published by Médiapop Editions.
• 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 bodily envelopes—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 emerges a feeling of desire, an aspiration to belong to a broader, more ancient order of life.
The figure is not approached as an isolated subject, but as a medium of expression, carrying a language where gestures and textures intertwine. From this perspective, Our Wild Lives opens up 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.
