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By: Kareem Islamiyat
In Lagos, stories rarely announce themselves. They drift through conversations, gestures, shared spaces. For Diran Aderinto, those unspoken rhythms became his earliest classroom, long before film schools, galleries, or public screens across Europe.
Today, the Manchester-based visual artist is emerging as one of the quiet but compelling voices shaping contemporary diasporic visual practice in the UK and Europe, working at the intersection of moving image, sound, research and public space.
His journey, from cultural institutions in Lagos to academic and civic platforms in Britain, reflects a practice grounded not in spectacle, but in attention.
From Lagos, Where Stories Gather
One of Diran’s earliest professional engagements with public cultural work took place at Terra Kulture in Lagos, a hub where literature, theatre, and contemporary art intersect. There, working on commissioned creative projects, he began to understand artistic practice as something inseparable from its social environment.
The work, he observed, did not exist in isolation. It absorbed the movement, language, and presence of people who encountered it.
That early exposure shaped a sensibility that would later define his approach: creative practice as dialogue, between maker and audience, institution and community, memory and space.
Manchester as a Question
Relocating to the United Kingdom marked more than a change of address. Manchester, with its industrial history, migratory layers and lived multiculturalism, presented itself as a city of questions rather than answers.
Diran entered this landscape through the MA Filmmaking programme at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University.
But instead of treating postgraduate study as a path toward a single finished work, he used it as a site of inquiry, examining how image, sound and spatial experience can operate together to explore identity, migration and belonging.
It was within this research-driven environment that one of his most significant works began to take form.
ISILO: Memory in Motion
Developed as part of his master’s dissertation, ISILO emerged as a research-led installation exploring embodied memory and cultural movement among Black migrants in Manchester.
The project’s title draws from the Yoruba phrase e see lor, a term associated with emigration and crossing thresholds. For Diran, it became both conceptual anchor and metaphor, capturing how people carry fragments of one place into another.
Rather than compressing migrant experiences into a single narrative, ISILO allowed them to remain layered. Moving image, sound and spatial design worked together to create an environment audiences did not simply watch, they moved through.
Voices surfaced and receded. Images overlapped. Sound drifted. A football pitch appeared not as symbol but as shared ground, where belonging emerged through action and interaction.
Presented at the SODA Degree Show, ISILO engaged thousands of visitors, operating simultaneously as academic research and public cultural work.
Influence, Dialogue and Diasporic Space
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Diran’s practice sits within a broader conversation shaped by contemporary Black British and diasporic visual traditions.
In Manchester, this dialogue resonates with the work of Jenn Nkiru, whose acclaimed projects explore Black history, architecture and memory through layered image and sound.
Nkiru’s The Great North, developed with Factory International, treats the city itself as an archive, a method she describes as “cosmic archaeology.” While Diran does not replicate this aesthetic, he shares its underlying philosophy: that moving image can function as ritual, memory and collective presence, not merely representation.
This influence is evident in his refusal to close his work into fixed meanings, allowing collaboration and encounter to shape outcomes.
From galleries to public screens
That openness found wider expression through Pardesi Raga, a project shortlisted for the CIRCA Art Prize, selected from more than 1,500 international submissions. The work was presented on large-scale public screens in London, Milan and Paris, bringing moving image directly into civic space.
Here, art appeared not behind doors or tickets, but within daily urban flow, intersecting with commuters, pedestrians and city rhythms.
Diran played a key role in shaping the project’s visual rhythm and spatial adaptability, ensuring it could operate across cinematic and site-responsive contexts.
He also collaborated on its sound environment, exploring how audio could carry emotional resonance across open, public settings.
The project later took on another form as a multi-channel installation at Manchester Museum’s South Asia Gallery, one of the UK’s most visited university museums. Installed across three screens with layered sound, the work invited visitors to move through it as an environment rather than observe it from a fixed position.
The work behind the work
Behind these public moments lies a slower, quieter practice. Diran often begins with listening, time spent in community spaces, open-ended conversations, long hours with archival materials and collaborators.
Sound practitioners, designers, researchers: each project becomes a site of exchange. Ideas are tested, reshaped, sometimes abandoned.
“This openness isn’t a lack of direction,” one collaborator notes. “It’s a form of care.”
Looking Ahead
Diran is currently developing Home in the Horizon, a long-term UK-based project tracing how memory travels through neighbourhoods, families and everyday life, particularly among earlier generations of migrants.
Conceived as an immersive cultural environment rather than a linear narrative, the project will bring together sound, image and archival material to create spaces people can enter, linger within, and leave carrying something intangible but lasting.
A Practice of Attention
From Terra Kulture in Lagos to academic spaces at SODA, from public screens in European capitals to gallery installations in Manchester, Diran’s journey is defined less by milestones than by crossings, between places, people and ways of seeing.
In a cultural landscape often driven by speed and certainty, his work offers something quieter: an invitation to slow down, listen, and recognise that belonging is not declared, but built, patiently, collectively, and over time.
Diran Aderinto is a Manchester-based visual artist whose work unfolds through the relationships between image, sound, and the spaces people move through. His practice is shaped by listening as much as by making, tracing questions of identity, memory, and movement through encounters with communities, histories, and everyday places.
