Blacken the substrate
To unvoid the void, an attempt
So that we can know the not-known
Calling to life what is not there
It is not by mistake that you are here. Something inside of me was stretching across the boundaries of time to reach you.
My name is Olivia Muoviel Kayang. I am a Ghanaian artist and writer slowly reclaiming the ancestral memories linking Ghana and the U.S. Much of my work meditates on the histories embedded in the Atlantic Ocean, remembering those whose resting place lies there.
In Ghana, there are castles and forts marking the architecture of slavery. But there are no names. There is a culture of silence. We erased our memories. I want to remember. I want us to remember. So that we can reclaim the past and imagine a different future out of it. Sankofa.
But even in the pain I want to also make space for hope. Because there is so much hope to share. And there is so much beauty in the world. In the land. In the trees. In the ocean.
I work with materials that convey the impossibility of fully situating a presence that is already departed. A mark that disappears into a surface, a photographic print that escapes ink, a body that cannot hold (cavernous, empty, failing at the seams), a vacuum left by a question. These works signify an elsewhere, a here but not here, or not yet here (yet to arrive). I hope that these gestures create an opening for a kind of poetry that conjures the subtleties of the body to emerge.
I believe in the presence of things unseen. That empty rooms are filled with traces of bodies that were once there. That marks hold history and open up an interface for communicating between past and present.
I make to answer questions. How do I represent the body without the physical body? How can silence hold the weight of a body long evanesced? Can an empty room speak?
I am glad you are here.
Language has the power to alter our internal and external realities.