Valuable Okoyomon fills Roman chapel with a backyard of unearthly delights

It’s alive! It’s alive! Not Dr. Frankenstein’s fiend, however one other endearing monster born of human intervention within the pure world. This one is an animatronic stuffed bear, whose brown fur may use a comb-out. It wears its white lace panties like a diaper, head bandaged with an outsized white bow. Tipping the scales at 85lbs, it will stand round a metre tall, had been it not mendacity on its facet within the underbrush of a dense, fragrant backyard as if in a post-coital swoon, or ravaged by a predator, or just overcome by intoxicating scents. Probably all three.

Named for the haunting title character of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, the semi-conscious bear is the central sculptural ingredient of the solar eats her youngsters—a dwelling, permacultural setting by Valuable Okoyomon that’s as threatening as it’s fertile.

These opposing dynamics had been a part of what made the New York-based, Nigerian-American artist’s contribution of a kudzu and sugar cane fortress, I imply forest, a spotlight of Cecilia Alemani’s central exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Okoyomon’s set up was additionally an act of resistance—in opposition to racism, colonialism, and some other limiting energy that’s its personal worst enemy in addition to ours.

Okoyomon’s stability of the horrifying and the comical, the evil and the restorative, reaches a mad-genius peak within the gallery at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, a deconsecrated ninth-century Roman chapel. Since 2015, when the seller Gavin Brown took over the long-abandoned oratory, it has functioned as an distinctive house for exhibitions by up to date artists, together with Joan Jonas, Arthur Jafa and the late Jannis Kounellis

Although simply 29, the singular Okoyomon belongs of their firm. “I’ve all the time performed with soil and crops,” Okoyomon advised me throughout their present’s set up. There may be loads of each within the church, now an LED-lit hothouse with gravel pathways and black butterflies that open sky-blue wings to bop like Tinkerbells by the 10m-high house, which fills with heavenly symphonic music by Kelsey Lu.

Amongst different sound results, the prolonged scream that rents the air each ten minutes to wake Beloved from her slumber is bloodcurdling sufficient to make Edvard Munch sit up in his grave. Okoyomon, who typically works with collaborators, recorded the scream by mixing their very own voice with these of the choreographer-performer Okwui Okpokwasili and the influential Black author and scholar Saidiya Hartman.

A way of the constructive grows with the jasmine climbing the seasoned partitions of the church, the place a aromatic mixture of tall lilies, honeysuckle, white dogwood, purple roses and different greenery baptise viewers with fragrances that counter the setting’s darkish underbelly.

“I wished quite a lot of toxic crops,” the artist declared. They didn’t say that out of spite; the butterflies eat the poison, drop eggs, and after they die give beginning to succeeding generations that fly free. By the exhibition’s closing in September, the entire crops’ intentionally unchecked development will develop into a jungle of competing wills, every expressing the liberty to be themselves in a distinct but communal means.

Gardens have lengthy equipped artists and writers with all types of metaphors. Okoyomon makes use of their botanicals for efficient commentary on Black our bodies, submissiveness, energy, migration, molestation, playfulness, decay, distinction and household relations that I discovered each dizzying and distinctive.

Born in London to Nigerian mother and father, Okoyomon lived in Lagos till earlier than decamping with their mom to the American Midwest. In Chicago, Okoyomon studied pataphysics and little one psychology whereas cooking in one of many metropolis’s prime eating places. Okoyomon then moved to New York and volunteered at A neighborhood backyard, however from the beginning recognized primarily as a poet.

It was poetry that introduced Okoyomon into the artwork world. That was in 2017, when Hans Ulrich Obrist learn their first printed quantity and invited Okoyomon’s participation in a night of readings on the Serpentine Gallery. A yr later, Okoyomon went again to carry out a brand new play, an epic poem starring 4 child lambs and 4 Black angels. At Artwork Basel a short while later, Obrist moderated a dialog between Okoyomon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, for whom cooking is a central tenet of his artwork.

Okoyomon additionally met Brown, Tiravanija’s seller. It’s all related.
Curiously, the artist had by no means has been on any gallery’s roster—one other type of resistance. That has not gotten in the way in which of their cascading institutional solo exhibits: MMK in Frankfurt (2020), Efficiency House New York (2021) and the Aspen Artwork Museum (2021-22). In 2021, Okoyomon gained each the Frieze New York artist award and the Chanel Subsequent Prize. Their present present in Rome is their first in a (nominally) business house.

A profession as a visible artist was not Okoyomon’s intention when beginning out as a author. “I didn’t have a plan,” they mentioned. “However in some way I all the time knew that my phrases would information me.”

• Valuable Okoyomon: the solar eats her youngsters, Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, till 16 September