Through suspended figures, taxidermied bird wings, discarded toys, and altered dolls, Precious Okoyomon creates a haunting sculptural environment that confronts racial violence, memory, grief, and the unsettling relationship between innocence and harm.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Precious Okoyomon presents a deeply symbolic installation that brings beauty and discomfort into the same space.
Born in London and based in Brooklyn, Okoyomon creates sculptural environments in which familiar materials take on unexpected and often disturbing meanings.
In Everything Wants to Kill You and You Should Be Afraid, suspended figures made from taxidermied bird wings and discarded children’s toys hover throughout the installation.
The figures can initially appear almost angelic. Yet that impression quickly becomes more complicated as their materials, forms, and historical references begin to emerge.
Everything Wants to Kill You and You Should Be Afraid
The title immediately establishes an atmosphere of vulnerability and danger.
Okoyomon creates figures that seem caught somewhere between fantasy and reality, beauty and violence, innocence and experience.
Bird wings give the suspended forms an ethereal quality, while discarded children’s toys introduce associations with childhood, play, and vulnerability.
Together, these materials create objects that resist a single interpretation.
Their apparent innocence exists alongside much darker references to the history of racial violence in the United States.
Innocence and Harm
That contradiction becomes even more pronounced through Okoyomon’s altered dolls.
The artist combines vintage bunny suits with blackface doll heads, bringing together imagery associated with childhood innocence and racist caricature.
The resulting objects are deliberately uncomfortable.
They occupy a disturbing space between play and punishment, forcing histories that might otherwise remain separated from everyday objects into direct confrontation.
The familiar becomes unfamiliar.
The playful becomes threatening.
And objects associated with childhood become carriers of historical violence and cultural memory.
Beauty and Discomfort
One of the most powerful aspects of Okoyomon’s installation is the way beauty never completely disappears.
The wings, suspended bodies, and theatrical arrangement can create moments of visual wonder.
But that beauty exists alongside unease.
Rather than resolving those contradictions, Okoyomon allows them to remain present simultaneously.
The installation can therefore be experienced as both poetic and disturbing—a space where attraction and repulsion, tenderness and violence, innocence and harm continually overlap.
Objects, Bodies, and Memory
Throughout the installation, distinctions between object and subject also begin to blur.
Discarded toys are transformed into sculptural bodies. Animal materials become part of humanlike forms. Dolls carry histories far beyond their original functions.
These transformations give the objects a strange sense of presence.
They become vessels through which histories, memories, and cultural associations can return.
Okoyomon’s use of found and altered materials suggests that objects are never entirely neutral. They can accumulate meanings and continue carrying histories long after their original contexts have disappeared.
Precious Okoyomon at the Whitney Biennial 2026
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, Okoyomon’s installation becomes a meditation on contradiction.
It confronts painful histories without abandoning poetry, imagination, or beauty.
The work asks viewers to remain inside that discomfort rather than searching for an easy resolution.
Through suspended figures, altered dolls, animal materials, and discarded objects, Precious Okoyomon creates an environment in which grief, racial history, memory, vulnerability, and resilience exist together—producing a space that is as haunting as it is poetic.
Explore the Complete Tarik Talk Whitney Biennial 2026 Series
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