Gallery installation by the collective practice of artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, co-commissioned by the Wexner Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
sweat variant, the collective practice of artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, is showing where you go full, volume 5 at the Wexner Center for the Arts through January 24, 2027. The exhibition opened on September 20, 2026, and runs in the galleries. It's a co-commission by the Wexner Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and it grew out of the physical research for adaku, part 2, a work that's having its world premiere at the Wexner Center this month.
Okpokwasili and Born usually work in multidisciplinary performance, and this installation is their way of extending that practice into the gallery space. Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer—a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award winner. Born is a director, composer, and designer who's picked up four Bessie Awards. Between them, they've shown at MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Berlin Biennale.
adaku is a trilogy that imagines how a family in precolonial West Africa becomes entangled in the transatlantic slave trade. Its second part, adaku, part 2, is set in the US in the near future and looks at the consequences of erasure when events lead to sudden remembering. The exhibition is the gallery counterpart to that work.
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If you want to see the performance itself, adaku, part 2 runs from October 20 to 22, 2026, with shows at 7 PM. The exhibition stays up long after that, through January 24, 2027. Entry is free for all audiences.
