COLLABORATIVE WORK
WITH YUSSEF AGBO–OLA
OMI LIBATIONS

SCHERING STIFTUNG, BERLIN, GERMANY
25 APRIL – 7 JULY 2024

The exhibition OMI LIBATIONS is the result of a collaboration between the artist Tabita Rezaire, the artist-architect Yussef Agbo-Ola, and the biologists Alex Jordan and Anja Wegner from the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Konstanz.

Installation view of the exhibition Omi Libations at the Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Photo: © Jens Ziehe

The exhibition centers on a structure titled Omi: Yemoja Temple envisioned by the artists which is dedicated to the Yoruba Orisha Yemoja. In the pantheon of the West African Yoruba people, Yemoja is considered to be the mother spirit of rivers and oceans and all creatures living therein.

Installation view of the exhibition Omi Libations at the Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Photo: © Jens Ziehe

The exhibition focuses on water as the source of life. The conceptual foundation was laid by a research trip that Rezaire and Agbo-Ola undertook with the scientists. Their research took them to Zanzibar, an archipelago off the coast of Tanzania, and to Lake Tanganyika, where they studied the local water fauna including fish, corals, and micro-organisms.

Installation view of the exhibition Omi Libations at the Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Photo: © Jens Ziehe

FEATURED ARTIST

YUSSEF AGBO-OLA

Yussef Agbo-Ola (b. 1990 in Newport News, Virginia, United States ) is an artist and architect living between London, Lagos, and the Amazon Forest. Born in rural Virginia in a multi-heritage Nigerian, African-American, and Cherokee household, his work reflects hybrid identities and relationships to different landscapes, ecologies, and cultural rituals. Agbo-Ola’s multidisciplinary artistic practice is concerned with interpreting natural energy systems, through interactive experiments that explore the connections between an array of sensory environments, from the biological and anthropological to the perceptual and microscopic. His practice...
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