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“I’m a poet at heart…It just happens that all I know how to do is translate the world with poetry and language. Sometimes that becomes an installation, or it becomes an object, or I’m feeding you, or it’s just the time we spend together. Everything is this non-stop, endless poem that rolls into new worlds.”

Born in London and raised in the United States, Okoyomon eventually rooted their practice in New York City. Their formative years in rural landscapes deeply inform their sensibility yet it was their move to an urban environment thatthat catalyzed a vital shift in their creative language.

Spanning poetry, installation, performance, and ritual, Okoyomon’s practice defies classification. Following the release of their acclaimed poetry collection Ajebota, they ventured into immersive environments—living ecosystems composed of organic matter and wild growth. Their 2022 Venice Biennale presentation for the UK Pavilion, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, examined the complex entanglements of colonial histories, invasive flora, and the poetics of resistance.

“I’ve been a gardener my whole life because my mum gardens, my grandma gardens, but they don’t think about it as gardening… they’re seed savers who continuously plant the thing they know and that has translated to me.”

Survival and transformation are central themes in Okoyomon’s oeuvre. Their recent exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, One Either Loves Oneself or Knows Oneself, offers an experiential journey through shadowed corridors into a dreamlike sanctuary. At its heart is a monumental teddy bear—an invitation to rest, to exhale, to dream in the presence of strangers, accompanied by a score that lulls visitors into a hypnagogic state.

“It’s a very vulnerable show to me. I wanted to create a space where you can daydream without ego, to take a collective breath with strangers. In a lot of ways, it’s about my rituals and my life. I believe that our dreams are visions from other worlds…”

Deeply rooted in both historical and ecological consciousness, Okoyomon’s work often incorporates materials with layered symbolism. Kudzu—an invasive vine native to East Asia—reappears as both medium and metaphor: a living testament to resistance, migration, and resilience. In Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light Touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty (Aspen Art Museum), they transformed a rooftop into a shifting seasonal landscape, reclaiming flora lost to industrial control and ecological erasure.

As the conversation drew to a close, Okoyomon spoke of future visions: a worldwide network of “feral, invasive food forests,” and a radically inclusive queer sanctuary for artistic experimentation and communal living.

With a practice that resists borders and embraces metamorphosis, Okoyomon invites us into lush, destabilizing worlds—where poetry grows wild, and every encounter is a seed of possibility. As Obrist reflects, their work is “a miracle and a risk”—a bold, generous leap into the yet-to-come.