Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies

In his first solo museum exhibition, Olalekan Jeyifous (US, b. Nigeria, 1977) imagines an archive of remnants surfaced from a speculative river enclave. Neither utopian nor dystopian, the enclave emerges from the histories of the Mississippi River yet exists outside of fixed time. Foregrounding the river as a keeper of ecological, spiritual, and industrial memory, Jeyifous melds African diasporic cosmologies with Indigenous water knowledge into a meditation on the entanglements between waterways and people.

Rather than proposing a single, bounded narrative, Hydricosmic Litanies unfolds across a series of short, linked passages. Milled-wood reliefs depict stories of both environmental connection and material extraction. Carved sculptures suggest a belief system born of Yorùbá, Dakota, and Ojibwe contact. Nets and bindings evoke the nourishing possibilities of river life, alongside its histories of labor and enslavement. The churn of water and song washes over the ever-present hum of machinery.

The artist assembles these fragments into a world shaped by flow, accumulation, and return. From the Niger to the Mississippi, the installation echoes the logic of the river systems it honors, inviting visitors to follow its looping currents and its living presence.