Aurora Agraria
Aurora Agraria
“Auroria Agraria" (2026) by Olalekan Jeyifous at Grand Central Madison
About the project
Olalekan Jeyifous’s digital animation “Aurora Agraria” imagines a retro-futurist landscape where transit, ecology, and spiritual understandings of the world meet. The piece follows two siblings traveling on a makeshift hover‑train as they leave a post‑urban community and head to an upstate wilderness settlement for a weekend with family.
The animation unfolds across five synchronized screens, each offering a distinct cinematic vantage of their journey. As the scenery shifts from city edges to countryside, subtle visual elements—guardian figures, shrines, and symbolic ecological forms—hint at deeper connections among land, memory, and movement.
Encountered in fragments as commuters pass through the terminal, “Aurora Agraria” turns an everyday train ride into a meditation on sibling bonds. The layered mix of spiritual and cultural landscapes woven into the post‑industrial setting suggests how travelers move not only across physical space but also through different worlds of meaning.
The artwork is on view through August 2026.
About the artist
Olalekan Jeyifous is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines social spaces that examine the relationships between architecture, community, and the environment. He has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and the Museum of Modern Art, where his artwork is featured in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design.
In addition to an extensive exhibition history, Jeyifous has spent over a decade creating large-scale installations for a variety of public spaces and was co-commissioned to design a monument honoring congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as part of the City of New York's "She Built NYC" initiative. Jeyifous has garnered numerous awards, including the notable Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Additionally, he is a recipient of the 2021 Fellowship by the United States Artists and has been a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and completed artist residencies at the Bellagio Center, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Drawing Center's Open Sessions program. He received a BArch from Cornell University.