My name is Olivia Muoviel Kayang. I am a visual artist and a writer. I often refer to myself as an artist-writer or a writer-artist (thank you Renee Gladman for the language) because I understand writing as an intrinsic part of my practice, one that unfolds in multiple different but interconnected forms including photography, installation, spoken word, video poetry, performance, drawing, sound, silence. My visual practice begins at the point where written language reaches its limit, where it either falters in fully conveying an idea, a feeling or an emotion, or reaches the bounds of what is knowable or utterable.
I approach making through layers of questioning. On the formal layer, regarding material choices for instance, I am guided by elements of language and literary devices, such as rhyme and repetition (what happens when a gesture is echoed within a room) and syntax (how does the (dis)arrangement of similar or contrasting gestures provide meaning). I explore how these aspects of language and writing can be translated visually. I keep returning to contradictions as a starting inquiry. I ask whether a body’s presence can be felt yet be absent, or appear in a space yet not be visible. Like poetry that appears dense on first reading yet invokes an emotional response, can contradictions in visual material trigger similar emotional resonances? In When the World Gets Dark (Hide in the Shadows), I experiment with light and shadow in self-portrait photographs, controlling how much of my body is revealed in the light and how much remains in the shadow. In Because I came looking for You, I create concave cavernous forms, asking how much material is needed to invoke the presence of a body in a room. And in Tributaries and Ghosts, I abstract the body even further, asking whether marks from a hand, barely visible against translucent vellum, are enough to call a body into being.
Along with these questions, my process of making opens up a space for meditating on other questions about memory, migration, belonging, self-perception, the ways histories inhabit the body, and the relationships between people, place, and the earth, to intertwine personal narratives with historical ones. My emphasis on the body comes from a primary concern about the ways narratives have historically been inscribed upon the body, especially Black/African and womxn’s bodies. I ask whether these narratives can be un-written or re-written, whether the body can exist within a state of legibility and illegibility, whether a kind of poetry can be sutured into the body to repair traumatic histories within it. I find inspiration in nature, which exists and flourishes without bearing all the answers. I make work along both shores of the Atlantic ocean, in Ghana and in the US, and alongside trees which I am learning by name.