Olalekan Jeyifous transforms the Mississippi into a site of memory, ecology, and speculative futures at the Walker Art Center.
21 July 2026
This August, the Walker Art Center presents ‘Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies’, the first solo museum exhibition by the acclaimed Nigerian American artist, architect, and designer. The exhibition expands Jeyifous’ celebrated practice of speculative world building through an immersive installation of sculpture, relief works, experimental video, and sound.
Drawing inspiration from the Mississippi River and Ben Okri’s seminal novel The Famished Road, ‘Hydricosmic Litanies’ imagines waterways as living archives where ecological histories, spiritual knowledge, labour, displacement, and collective memory converge. Rather than treating the river as a backdrop, Jeyifous positions it as an active force that shapes communities while exposing the enduring consequences of colonisation, industrialisation, and environmental extraction.
Visitors enter a fictional riverine enclave populated by sculptural relics, layered soundscapes, and imagined artefacts that blur archaeology with futurism. African diasporic cosmologies intersect with Indigenous water narratives to propose alternative ways of inhabiting landscapes and imagining just futures. The exhibition continues Jeyifous’ long-standing investigation into architecture as a vehicle for social transformation, offering a vision that is as poetic as it is politically resonant.
At a moment when climate crisis and urban inequality demand new ways of thinking, ‘Hydricosmic Litanies’ demonstrates how speculative art can illuminate histories that persist beneath the surface while inviting audiences to imagine more equitable worlds still to come.
This exhibition will be on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, from 6 August 2026 until 3 January 2027.
