On a hill in southern Sweden, an old garden structure acquired a new interior life. Evan Ifekoya made an architectural intervention in a gazebo at Wanås Konst for The Ocean in the Forest II in 2024. The structure, thought by the sculpture park to date from the 1920s, became a space for movement, sound and energy. It was already a place built for a particular way of looking at land. Ifekoya asked what might happen when another way of listening enters it.
The work belongs to a practice that rarely gives the visitor a single image of a future. Ifekoya makes sound, film, performance and installations that change the conditions in which people meet. A voice can seem to arrive from another time. A beat can make a room feel less fixed. A film can protect its participants from a camera's claim to possess them. Ifekoya was born in Iperu, Nigeria, and is based in London, according to Wanås Konst. Their Swedish work is an encounter with a Nordic site, rather than evidence that they live in the region.
Ifekoya has described their installations as a means of opening another way of inhabiting space and time. In a conversation with LUX, they speak of world building through voice and the reconfiguration of archives and histories. Octavia Butler's fiction and journals, which Ifekoya studied in her archive, have influenced the practice of speaking possibilities into existence. The connection to Black speculative art is therefore audible and material. It appears in a drum, in a room prepared for visitors, and in the decision to let an image withhold as much as it reveals.
A film made of invitations
The 2021 film Undercurrent 528 brings several bodies into relation without making them interchangeable. Its elements include a drummer, a dancer and a breath-work workshop involving queer, trans and nonbinary people of colour. Some participants joined in person and others through a screen. A voice guides the film, and the rhythmic score grows from a drummer's encounter with an instrument. These are not illustrations placed under a single message. The film moves among distinct actions that ask what a collective space can hold.
Ifekoya made the work in response to the films of Stephen Dwoskin. In the LUX interview, they identify his Ballet Black as an important structural reference. The drummer, dancers and workshop in that earlier film helped them organise their own. The relationship is formal as well as historical. Ifekoya did not take over Dwoskin's images or claim his gaze as their own. They borrowed a way of moving between rehearsal, performance and a body at work, then asked what such a structure could do for the people entering their film.
The drummer Remi Graves developed the rhythmic material during a studio session with Ifekoya. Rather than ask for a predetermined demonstration, the artist watched Graves follow the instrument through changes of energy, including fatigue. Ifekoya then worked with producer Tygapaw on the score. That sequence matters because the film's sound did not arrive as a decorative finish. It grew from another person's physical effort and from a collaboration that turned that effort into an environment for the film's other encounters.
Ifekoya also drew on Sylvia Wynter's thinking about Carnival, ritual and the drum. In their account to LUX, the drum can change a mental landscape. The claim is not that one rhythm produces the same feeling in every listener. Its force lies in allowing a body to follow a pulse and discover a relation between memory, motion and attention. The voice at the film's opening can sound, as Ifekoya puts it, both disembodied and intimate, perhaps outside ordinary time and perhaps inside the listener's own thoughts. It makes room for several locations of feeling at once.
The breath-work workshop presented a different formal problem. Its participants had agreed to filming, yet Ifekoya wanted to avoid turning a private practice of pleasure and attention into an exhibition for strangers. They worked with cinematographer Rufai Ajala, who also brought experience as an intimacy coordinator. In the artist's description, flare and partial obscurity arose in the camera at the time of filming. They were not effects later added to announce artistic difficulty. A body can remain present while the frame refuses to make every detail available.
This is a significant choice in a film about speculative life. The future is often pictured as a fully rendered landscape awaiting exploration. Undercurrent 528 builds possibility through consent, rhythm and the limits of looking. A participant's breath is their own act; a viewer witnesses part of it. A drummer's movement can become sound without the performer becoming raw material for a grand theory. A dancer's body can move through the frame without being reduced to an emblem. The film's world is built by the relations among its makers.
Abundance as a starting condition
In 2018, Ifekoya made Ritual Without Belief at Gasworks in London. The title carried a visual revision: in the artist's account to the British Council, the word “without” was struck through. That mark changes the proposition. It does not resolve whether belief is present or absent. It lets the viewer meet the question as an action performed on language.
Ifekoya began the exhibition by asking what it would mean to start from abundance. They described the undernourishment that can come when Black, queer and other marginalised artists are expected to work for little or no pay while serving as tokens for institutions. The response was not a motivational slogan. Ifekoya turned their attention to mental health, relations with collaborators and the terms on which they wanted to move through the world. The exhibition made those conditions part of its form.
A six-hour sound work was central to the project. In the British Council interview, Ifekoya describes an assembly of voice notes, music and excerpts from films around a Black queer algorithm that connects generations, places and political positions. The word “algorithm” might suggest an invisible machine sorting people into categories. Here it names a different arrangement: Black queer references carrying one another across time, without the demand that every participant be made to sound alike.
The length of the sound work matters. Six hours exceed the quick encounter through which a museum visitor is often expected to grasp a piece and leave. A voice may recur or a musical change may only become meaningful after another sound has prepared the ear. Listening requires time that the visitor cannot compress into a glance. This duration gives abundance a concrete measure. It refuses the scarcity of attention that can make people and images immediately consumable.
Ifekoya had visited Butler's archive in Los Angeles before making the show. In the LUX conversation, they recall the effect of reading not only Butler's novels but also her journals and private addresses to herself. The influence lies in the relation between writing and action. To articulate a life that has not yet arrived is to prepare for it, even when no one can guarantee its arrival. Ifekoya's sound work similarly speaks across absences. A message recorded in one place can be heard by a person who was never present for its making.
The exhibition also included an encounter with Ajamu X's photograph Bodybuilder with Bra. In a Mousse interview, Ifekoya explains that the image had remained with them since they found it in a Stuart Hall essay. They wanted it physically present, in dialogue with their work. To give an artwork a place because it has sustained you is different from claiming to absorb it into your own authorship. Ifekoya describes the gesture as a gift to themselves that can also be offered to others. The exhibition's constellation of references consequently includes another artist's independent work and history.
Ritual Without Belief fed into collective organising. Ifekoya and fellow organisers established the Black Obsidian Sound System in 2018, according to LUX. The collectively run sound system makes its own work with people, equipment and time. Its relationship to Ifekoya's solo practice lies in a shared interest in who controls a sonic environment, who can feel safe inside it and how a gathering can be made with rather than for its participants. It shows how a speculative practice may require a real organisation to sustain it.
Making a museum resonate
At the Migros Museum in Zurich, Ifekoya's 2022 installation ~ Resonant Frequencies transformed the ground floor into a multisensory environment. The museum's description begins with a portal unit for encounter and retreat. At its centre stood a sculptural sound object represented as a sun. Through it came the voice of Oceanic Sage, a name used by Ifekoya. The piece joined an architecture that visitors could enter with a voice that gave the sun an interior presence.
The portal is not a science-fiction prop offering instant passage to another planet. Its effect depends on a person's bodily time. Entering a room, deciding where to stand, hearing a voice and choosing how long to remain are ordinary actions. The installation makes them available for reflection. A museum floor, usually treated as neutral display space, becomes a place where listening alters the terms of attention. The visitor can seek retreat and encounter in the same structure.
Ifekoya's museum glossary discusses resonance as a relation between an internal frequency and a driving one. The project uses particular sound frequencies, and the glossary notes claims that some listeners associate them with wellbeing. Those claims are not a medical promise. In the work, the conceptual question concerns attunement: whether a person might hear themselves and others differently through an arranged environment. The sun offers a way to experience that question without requiring a visitor to accept a universal account of healing.
The museum also presented Conversations on B L I S S, with Ifekoya inviting guests to discuss terms related to their own practices. The conversations brought spirituality, healing and transformation into a public setting while keeping other voices in the foreground. An installation can be spectacular by surrounding visitors with light and sound. Ifekoya also made it conversational. The speaking guest remains a distinct thinker, and a visitor receives the event as an exchange rather than an answer issued from the artist's authority.
The earlier sound work in Ritual Without Belief assembled an extended archive of Black queer voices. ~ Resonant Frequencies gave conversation an architectural setting and a figure of the sun. Undercurrent 528 made breathing and drumming part of the film's composition. Each medium produces a different relation between the person who sounds and the person who listens. Ifekoya follows that relation through changing sites instead of repeating a visual signature.
Listening in a Swedish forest
The Wanås commission placed this practice outside the gallery. The park's account identifies a pre-existing gazebo on a hill, altered by Ifekoya to form a sensory space. The structure carries a history of looking at a cultivated landscape. Sound and movement can change how that history is inhabited. The visitor enters a built frame and becomes aware of the body within it, of the landscape beyond it and of energy that cannot be located only in an image.
The exhibition's title, The Ocean in the Forest, came from the discovery of a prehistoric pine forest on the seabed near Wanås, according to the park. That fact opens a strange temporal scale: what is now underwater once grew in air. Ifekoya did not create the geological fact, and the title belonged to a group exhibition with several artists. Their contribution brought a separate inquiry into the relation between architecture, nature and the human body. The old gazebo and the submerged forest both unsettle the impression that a landscape has one permanent form.
This Swedish commission is a clear Nordic connection within a London-based practice. It also shows why place matters to the work. Ifekoya's film uses a live-work home and a simultaneous online workshop. The Zurich installation converts a museum floor into a resonant environment. At Wanås, a garden building within a forest becomes a chamber for sensing. The sites are not interchangeable backdrops for a single concept. Each supplies a different boundary: a camera frame, an institutional floor, an outdoor structure exposed to weather and passing visitors.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams editorial asks what the Democratic Republic of Congo's future might look like through a Stockholm fashion shoot and conversations with people connected to the country. Ifekoya works in different histories and media, but shares the question of who is allowed to imagine beyond the given present. Their film and installations give that question a physical register: which voices can be heard, which bodies can remain partly private, and what sort of room a future requires.
There is no single frequency that will tune every person to a better world. Ifekoya's work is exact about that difference. The drummer follows their instrument, the film participant governs their exposure, and the visitor chooses a path through a room. A future in these works is a set of relations made possible without demanding that anyone become a symbol for all Black or queer experience. A voice can travel, return and meet another voice. The architecture around it can change. That is enough to make the world feel less settled than it did on entering.