Precious Okoyomon: One Either Loves Oneself or Knows Onself

Precious Okoyomon’s work merges art, poetry, and performance, exploring identity, colonial history, and spirituality. At twenty-seven, they became Kunsthaus Bregenz’s youngest exhibitor, gaining recognition for nature-based installations. At the 2022 Venice Biennale, they transformed the Arsenale into a lush ecosystem, linking nature with Afrofuturistic visions and plant migration.

For “Kunsthaus Bregenz”, new works include Jung-inspired offices where visitors engage in dialogues on dreams and memories. Darkened stairwells evoke suffocation. On the first floor, stuffed animals hang from nooses, blending innocence and loss. A giant teddy bear on the second floor, abandoned on a pink carpet, evokes nostalgia, with ethereal music by Takiaya Reed.

The third floor features the well-known butterfly-filled garden and a film of Okoyomon flying over Ohio, reciting poetry to the sky—freedom glimpsed from behind a mesh barrier. Their 2024 poetry collection, “But Did You Die?”, resists structural violence with tenderness and mischief.