Precious Okoyomon

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Precious Okoyomon’s latest installation, the first work welcoming the public back into Performance Space New York since the pandemic began, is an offering to those who enter, to sit or stand or lay down in the uncomfortable space of grief that we so often avoid.

Considering the events of 2020—the pandemic and the repeating horrors of Black death—and responding to the brutal mood of apocalypse and rapture in the past year, Okoyomon sought to create an ecosystem that could hold grief. Okoyomon creates a wake for Black death that emulates and gestures toward the sublime horror done to our natural world by anti-Blackness. Okoyomon’s major material here is ash from incinerated kudzu, grown for their most recent exhibition, Earthseed, at the MMK in Frankfurt. The vine, originally from Japan, was used in the U.S. to prevent soil erosion resulting from the cultivation of cotton - a bandage intended to cover up the environmental tolls of slavery. It instead proliferated, and became known as “the vine that ate the south.”

Through Okoyomon’s use of natural materials—swirling with the symbolic weight of the kudzu ash—this work considers the thesis of Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and surrounds the notion that our atmospherical and climatological conditions are not just structured by anti-Blackness, but further founded in and through Black death. Sharpe refers specifically to how the environmental effects of slavery and the slave trade have quite literally transformed our physical world, and its patterns, and to how the ever-present psychological pressure applied on Black life by and after chattel slavery is an enviromment in and of itself.

Describes Okoyomon, “The creation of Earthseed started this ever-flourishing garden of kudzu, which was allowed to evolve and escape and be truly wild. At the end, it had to be killed: it couldn’t be transplanted to a new environment because it’s a monster. And the way I had to burn it all and the way that ash gets to have a new life here, it seemed the only reconcilable wake we could do for it, and one that would reflect the timeline of death we’ve been in. 2020 was the reckoning of death, and we’re still living in it. We have to face it and live in it and allow it to change us and be changed by it.”

Both ensuring Covid safety and allowing viewers the unrushed time and open space to be changed by the ecosystem, the installation will only be open to a few viewers at a time. Okoyomon adds, “A lot of people don’t get to go to an installation and just sit in there or lay down on the ground. But I feel like it’s going to be one of those special spaces where I want people to come and have time to self-fragilize.”

Precious Okoyomon is a poet and artist living in New York City. They make portals into new worlds. Okoyomon received the 2021 Frieze Artist Award and has had institutional solo exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau in Zurich (2018), and at the MMK in Frankfurt (2020), major performances commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2019). Their work was included in the 13th Baltic Triennial, and in group exhibitions at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Last fall, Okoyomon was an artist-in-residence at the LUMA Foundation in Arles. In 2021,they plan to mount solo exhibitions at the LUMA Foundation in Arles and the Aspen Art Museum , as well as at Performance Space New York. Their work is part of group exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum (2020) and the Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021). Their second book “But Did U Die?” is forthcoming from The Serpentine Galleries/Wonder Press in 2021.