David Olayide: A Template For Their Desires 02, 2024

David Olayide [b.2000] is a lens-based artist from Nigeria, whose works explore cultural identity, and environmental sustainability, inviting viewers into transformative dialogue with the world around them. He is the recipient of the Sub-Saharan Africa Arts Award, SABAA (2023) and the SUGI 1st prize, People & Nature (2024). His work has appeared in publications like PhotoVogue, The Four Faced Liar, Heimat Review, and Suboart Magazine. More recently, his work was featured in Global Health 50/50’s 2024 and 2025 Gender Climate Planetary Health Report, which explored the intersection of gender and the climate crisis.

A Template For Their Desires interrogates how women’s identities are often shaped, projected, and constrained by external expectations. The series features a lone female subject adorned with clusters of balloons—fragile, inflated, and precariously balanced—serving as metaphors for the invisible burdens and fantasies imposed upon women by society.

Shot in confined, textured spaces in Ile Ife, Nigeria, the images echo the quiet weight of isolation while visually amplifying the tension between individuality and social expectation. The balloons, represent the projections of desire placed upon women: to nurture, to conform, to perform beauty, to embody strength without vulnerability. Their ephemeral nature suggests both fragility and the inevitability of collapse, underscoring the impossibility of sustaining such imposed ideals.

This project also grows from my own observations of how women close to me—friends, and family—are constantly negotiating between who they are and who society wants them to be. By embedding these personal encounters into a conceptual frame, I seek to translate the intimate into the universal, allowing the work to resonate beyond individual experience.

In reframing the female subject as both muse and mirror, the work extends beyond individual experience to critique broader patriarchal and cultural constructs that regulate gender. In African societies—where tradition, religion, and contemporary pressures often converge—the female body becomes a contested site of meaning. A Template For Their Desires challenges these narratives, asking: Who truly owns the image of womanhood? And at what cost are these desires maintained?

This project situates itself within my wider practice of using visual storytelling to expose the unspoken emotional and social burdens carried by marginalized voices. By deliberately  stylizing the subject, I seek to highlight the universality of these pressures while inviting audiences into a dialogue on gender, autonomy, and resilience. Ultimately, the series transforms a simple, familiar object—the balloon—into a vessel of critique, reflection, and fragile defiance.