Wet ash falls from the ceiling. It slowly empties into an algae filled stream surrounded by moss covered boulders and gravel. Responding to last year’s brutal mood of apocalypse and rapture–the pandemic and repeating horrors of Black death– Precious Okoyomon’s installation creates an ecosystem that seeks to hold grief. Visitors are invited to sit or stand or lay down in the uncomfortable space of mourning that we so often avoid.
The main material here is the ash from the incinerated kudzu, grown for Okomoyon’s most recent exhibition, Earthseed, at the MMK in Frankfurt. The vine, originally from Japan, was used to prevent soil erosion resulting from the cultivation of cotton during slavery; a bandage intended to cover up the environmental tolls of slavery, it instead proliferated, and became known as “the vine that ate the south.”
With FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD Okoyomon turns the Keith Haring Theatre into a wake for Black death allowing for catharsis, celebration, and closing: “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.”
Precious Okoyomon, FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD is made possible in part by grant from the National Performance Network.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
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