KUB 2025.01
Precious Okoyomon
01 | 02 – 25 | 05 | 2025
Press Conference
Thursday, January 30, 2025, 11 am
Opening
Friday, January 31, 2025, 7 pm
Artist's Talk
Saturday, February 1, 2025, 11 am
Precious Okoyomon, born in London in 1993, is an artist and poet. Their work adresses the natural world, histories of migration and racialization, but also the pure pleasures of everyday life. At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Okoyomon created a landscape with paths, rippling rivulets, flowerbeds, and kudzu in a hall of the Arsenale and populated the garden with woolen figures. The plant kudzu is a wild, fast-growing vine that over the months of the presentation overgrew everything and transformed the installation into a gigantic, impenetrable jungle.
In the summer of 2024 Okoyomon filled a greenhouse in the park of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel with their installation work the sun eats her children, made up of densely growing weeds, wildflowers and poisonous plants, butterflies, as well as an animatronic bear that emits an overlay of screams at regular intervals. Nature, art, and literature merge into one in Okoyomon’s works. The artist wrote their second book, a collection of love letters and cell phone notes, at the age of twenty-two. This collection of poetry, titled But Did You Die?, was published in September 2024. In an interview, Okoyomon explained that their own mother said that you have to put words into the ground for them to grow. “And I believed her. And, in some ways, they did grow, because now I make my gardens for my work.” The artist buries their poems like seeds. Poetry becomes nature, fulfilling the longing to thrive and unfold.
Four years ago, when Okoyomon was asked to exhibit at Kunsthaus Bregenz, they were one of the youngest artists in KUB history to be invited. In the meantime, Okoyomon’s work has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2021, at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2024. For Kunsthaus Bregenz, Okoyomon is developing works and installations that confront visitors with their dreams and their humanity.
Precious Okoyomon (b. 1993, London) is a Nigerian-American poet and artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. They have had solo exhibitions at the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid in 2024, at the Aspen Art Museum and at Performance Space New York in 2021, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 2020, and at Luma Westbau in Zurich in 2018. In 2024 Okoyomon participated in the Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale; in 2023 at the 11th Sequences Biennial, Reykjavik; and the Thailand Biennial, Chiang Rai; in 2022 at the 59th Venice Biennale and the Okayama Art Summit; in 2021 at the 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale; and in 2018 at the Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn. They took part in group exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel in 2024; Luma Arles in 2022; and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2021. In 2019 they realized performances at the Serpentine Galleries and the Institute of Contemporary Art, both in London. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award as well as the Chanel Next Prize. In 2024, But Did You Die?, their second book of poetry, was co-published by the Serpentine and Wonder Press.