In Nigeria’s Venice Biennale Pavilion, Criticism Meets Optimism

Folks in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest metropolis, are hardly shy. The stereotype runs towards boisterousness, worn as a degree of satisfaction. However when the artist and poet Valuable Okoyomon recorded interviews with some 60 metropolis residents in January for an artwork venture, the weird questions — like “Who was chargeable for the struggling of your mom?” — proved disarming.

Okoyomon relies in Brooklyn, however lived in Lagos as a baby and nonetheless visits there regularly. The artist was gathering materials for a sonic and sculptural set up that shall be introduced within the Nigeria Pavilion at this yr’s Venice Biennale. The occasion, one of many artwork world’s most essential, opens for previews subsequent week and to the general public on April 20.

Okoyomon’s steel-framed construction, erected in a courtyard, imagines a sort of radio tower, decked with bells and colonized by creeping vines. Movement sensors on the tower activate a soundtrack: It would play within the courtyard and likewise on-line, for anybody to tune in. It mixes poems by Okoyomon with music and passages from these interviews, whose respondents vary from fellow artists to “strangers, somebody’s cook dinner, somebody’s auntie,” Okoyomon mentioned.

After some cautious first reactions to the intimate 12-question protocol (tailored from one other poet, Bhanu Kapil), the conversations grew weak and actual, Okoyomon mentioned. The ensuing sound piece, was “a sort of talking in tongues,” as if tapping the unconscious of the town, Okoyomon added.

Okoyomon is a Venice veteran: In 2022, the artist introduced a major installation in the Biennale’s main exhibition. However this yr Okoyomon is likely one of the eight lauded artists to signify Nigeria within the nation’s second-ever Venice pavilion — considered one of nonetheless comparatively few African displays on the Biennale, and one of the vital bold in idea and scale.