Poet and artist Precious Okoyomon presented a new play The End of the World, a spectral-performance that asks the viewer to consider the visceral experience of anti-blackness as an errant and pathological virus and the double articulation of lightness and darkness, haunted inexorably by their racialisation.
For her new play The End of the World, with an original score by Yves B. Golden, Precious Okoyomon rescues her characters from classical antiquity and Christianity, where the angels of light, death and the sun have fallen to earth and a reckoning is coming.
The End of the World
Written and directed by Precious Okoyomon
With Phoebe Collings-James, Nancy Ofori, Vanessa Ohenlen and Vivian Oparah
Score by Yves B. Golden
Costumes by Fabian Kis-Juhasz
Precious Okoyomon is an artist and writer living and working in New York. She attended Shimer College in Chicago. Okoyomon has had solo exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau, Zurich, and two-person exhibitions at Real Fine Arts, New York (with Hannah Black) and Quinn Harrelson/Current Projects (with Puppies Puppies). Her work was included in the 13th Baltic Triennial and in group exhibitions at Exo Exo, Paris, and the ICA, London. Okoyomon has read or performed at The Kitchen and Artist’s Space in New York, and Serpentine Galleries in London. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Rubell Family Collection. Her first book Ajebota (2016) was published by Bottlecap Press, and her second book But Did U Die? is forthcoming from Wonder this autumn. Her work examines a history of the criminalisation and racialisation of light, darkness, and the sun (which Okoyomon believes to be indisputably black.)
Yves B. Golden is an interdisciplinary artist working between sculpture, poetry/prose, and performance. Golden is inspired by the sacred bond that can exist between memory and physical objects, using ancestral technologies to accentuate this tethering. Working from the center of their dominant mediums—poetry, prose and performance (P3)— their practice ponders the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ – measuring the predictable force that propels them back and forth. Golden’s recent exhibitions include Springsteen Gallery Baltimore, Berlin Project Space Festival, and Raw Material Company, Dakar Senegal.
