Olalekan Jeyifous Routes the Mississippi Through Walker Arts Center

The northern mouth of the Mississippi River is approximately a 3.5-hour drive from the Walker Arts Center, which on August 6 will open an exhibition inspired by that great American waterway. Olalekan Jeyifous, winner of the esteemed Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, is the artist behind it. Titled “Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies,” the show is his first solo museum exhibition. Instead of treating the river purely as natural scenery, Jeyifous re-envisions it as a record of change, displacement, identity, and belief.

“Rivers have long served as lifelines for ecological and cultural balance, but colonization and industrialization disrupted these reciprocal relationships, imposing systems of control and exploitation with lasting effects,” said Jeyifous, continuing, “This tension informs the exhibition’s materials and forms.”

The Famished Road, a novel by Ben Okri, was an additional source of inspiration, pointing to a visual pathway that connects the physical and spiritual worlds through diasporic themes. It incorporates a depth of mythological figures connected to African heritage as well as to displacement. Visitors to the Walker will enter a speculative river settlement existing outside a fixed historical time and place. It is not meant to be a post-apocalyptic or a paradise. The Mississippi itself functions as both a subject and an organizing system.

“What has stayed with me about Olalekan’s practice is its extraordinary breadth,” says curator Taylor Jasper, adding, “He moves across art, architecture, and design without ever losing sight of the political and human stakes of the worlds he imagines.”

“Hydricosmic Litanies” will be on view from August 6, 2026, through January 3, 2027.