PARADISE LOST
KAYODE OJO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK SETHI
INTERVIEW BY PIERRE-ALEXANDRE MATEOS AND CHARLES TEYSSOU
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ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Out of cheap jewelry, wigs, mirrors, fake fur, and counterfeit luxury goods, New York-based artist Kayode Ojo makes precarious, luminous sculptures—delicately arranged accoutrements of fake glamor. Titled “Eden,” his latest exhibition at 52 Walker is both a reference to the mythic garden of Bible legend, and an exploration of America’s history and present politics.
PIERRE-ALEXANDRE MATEOS
Could you tell more a little bit about “Eden,” your exhibition at 52 Walker that you will open in October?
KAYODE OJO
Sure. So the exhibition, we have this title “Eden,” which really, as you know probably, is a reference to the Garden from the Book of Genesis. I come from a very religious background. My parents are Nigerian, and they’re also evangelical Christians. I grew up reading the Bible twice a day, every day. But it’s so interesting, this idea of Eden. Genesis, it’s a very small part, but they basically described the creation of the universe. When you read the rest of the Bible, it’s almost like an afterthought, right?
It’s where everything started. Then Eve eats the apple, and God is so mad that he throws them out of Eden. Everything was perfect, and then this woman does this thing. The Bible’s really not nice to women the entire time and there’s just this really concentrated act of violence that happens right at the beginning of this massive book that’s supposed to explain to us the origin of the earth.
CHARLES TEYSSOU
What is interesting, too, is that when she eats the apple, what she creates is the idea of envy, of jealousy, which is something that is also part of your work.
KO
This is really the genesis of advertising, right? This mixture of realizing who you are and thinking about who you want to be. But then this whole thing, it’s basically splintered off into this dizzying array of different options in which as it goes further and further, and we need more and more specialists, more and more professionals to tell us exactly which object is going to help us to arrive at the status that we desire. And it never ends. And it’s constantly shifting.
PAM
So strategy and distinction both in the matter of commodities, objects, and in the matter of knowledge and how you perform knowledge towards a specific audience. The art critic David Rimanelli qualified your work as “hustler machines,” instead of Duchamp’s “bachelor machine”—“hustler machine,” of course, because you use lamé, fake fur, fake diamonds, counterfeit luxury goods.
KO
I find the idea of the hustler so fascinating, because what you have there is kind of an antiquated masculinity that is made to be sold. So what you’re really talking about with the hustler is this idea of inauthenticity. I think even the idea of a male prostitute ... Everyone understands a female prostitute somehow. People are used to buying and selling and trading women. But the idea of a male prostitute, suddenly no one knows quite what to do. And I think it’s interesting that these hustlers, they also are often presenting these hyper-masculine ideals as well. Again, it’s like advertising. It’s like you really need to be sure that they’re a traditional man somehow, even though their position in society is totally inverted.
PAM
Would you qualify your work as “macho slut” as an aesthetic category?
KO
“Macho slut?”
PAM
Something a little bit disco, decadent. I was also thinking about a certain kind of baroque that was very popular in New York in 2000, about Terence Koh ... a way to provoke something infused by celebrity culture, referring to Rihanna or Naomi Campbell, but touched by something masculine—maybe the macho aura of New York artwork.
KO
In this show, I’m working in large-scale sculpture, which you can say has a history from Richard Serra, Tony Smith ... There used to be this idea of these macho sculptors. But I think this idea of this macho sculpture, which for many reasons is risky economically, also has really fallen out of fashion, especially in New York. The real estate here favors painting. So this monumental sculpture is inherently macho, I guess. And I think the art world still favors a certain macho man. But this idea of sluttiness, I think, is really interesting. Because what does this word mean? I think it comes from authenticity and the idea that, if you sleep with many people, it’s not real. You’re not really feeling it. I think it’s holding on to this idea of perfect love and chastity, of this one person that you mate with for life.
PAM
I also think there’s this tension between the effeminate and the macho in your work.
CT
The aim to push gender stereotypes around interiority and externality, femininity and masculinity to their breaking point.
KO
What I’m wondering is: Is there really a tension there? I think that this kind of division between the sexualities of gay and straight, especially with men, I don’t know if it’s really still viable or that useful to think of. I don’t even know if that division ever really existed properly, because it really seems like it came from a panic that happened, I don’t even know, in the 50s or something. Do you know what I mean? I think this distinction between the sexualities of men, it comes from a panic, but you’ve never been able to really separate these two sides out. And I don’t think they’re that separate.
PAM
Another pair that coexists in tension in your work is this idea of the sublime versus the not: sublime because you often put commodity on a pedestal, on a mirror, everything that could emphasize the idea of sublime in matter of scale, in matter of sacrality, but, at the same time, you have always this deconstructive game with the value of the object you use, through the use of things like counterfeit objects, fast fashion.
KO
I guess the main thing there is that, when you talk about what is a pedestal and what is the object, for me, something you’ll notice is that usually ... You can’t always have total control, but I don’t often use a traditional art pedestal, that white thing made out of plywood. I’ve had to fight people about this because for me, it’s more like I’m thinking about Brâncuși, where it’s unclear what is the pedestal and what is the art object. The idea is that maybe the entire thing is an art object.
And then the idea of what is real and what is fake is so interesting, because: What is a luxury market? I think that it’s been a long time since you could say, “Oh, I bought this from a luxury brand. It means that it’s made very well.”
I don’t know if people buying something from Gucci now are checking to see, “Oh yeah, the seams ... ” It is not going to last forever. I think, in the past, maybe, something was expensive because it was well-made, but now, I think, the marketing is so much more important. But I also think, even with the things that I use, yes, some of the things that are from Zara, H&M. And yes, these brands make a lot of garbage,but every now and then they’ll make a garment that’s actually very beautiful, that has the same aura or essence that you would expect from a luxury brand. But again, it is hilarious to use these types of objects, because they make so many, but when people buy this stuff, often they just throw it away, so they actually do become very rare.
And also, if you buy something from Chanel that was on the runway, there’s an archive of it. Whereas with Zara, I don’t know if they have a record of everything they’ve ever made. And they probably don’t have a name. You know what I mean? So in some ways, with fast fashion, if you don’t buy it, you’ll probably never see it again.
KO
So one thing about the exhibition though is that, when you talk about Eden, it’s so interesting that it’s such a short part of the Bible or human history, so I’ve kind of likened it within this exhibition to Black Wall Street in Tulsa. And the show is happening in New York. Most of my shows have been in other places, mostly in Europe. Whenever I do a show, I always think about what the city means, what the country means. Even my show in Paris, it was gossip and drama and things like this. And then my shows in Germany ... It’s very strange to be a Black person in Germany. In my first show there, I had all these pictures of my hands around because I wanted this idea that you could tell the person that was in control of the situation, the person controlling the camera, was Black, which is very rare.
But then, when I went to Los Angeles, that show was all about the movies, all about films. And I made a film when I went there. But I live here in New York, and also it’s the United States. And I don’t usually make work about these types of racial dramas that are going on. But in the past few years... I guess I’m just kind of interested in thinking about the United States.
I’m thinking about how Eden is a lost paradise. And so, especially after BLM, people like to talk about the history of these places that used to be Black middle class, you know what I mean? Even like Central Park, I think used to be Black-owned, but this Black middle class is always disappearing, mostly by force. The government will sell the land, or people talk about people planting cocaine or crack in the neighborhoods in order to just destroy it all.
So there’s this idea that the United States has always been really aggressive towards the Black middle class. And so part of this exhibition ... Even using the color brown a lot. I am Brown and I use all this brown clothing. Taking brown as an aesthetic choice and depoliticizing it, but also realizing that this space is going to represent a short period of time in which this type of a Black utopia was possible. I think of utopia as just a Black middle class, Black normalcy.
Even all this art that was made recently about Black pain, Black death, listen—I think when you actually are a Black person, you get kind of burnt out thinking about all of that because you think about it every day. Every minute, every day, I think about this stuff. I think about violence against Black people every minute of every day. If I go out- side, I have to think about it. You know what I mean?
And so Eden represents a moment of peace or a new ... You have Afrofuturism, which always looks very retro. Have you noticed that? When someone talks to Afrofuturism, it always looks like it’s from the 60s or 70s. It’s a utopia, but it never makes it to the future. Even if you just go on Netflix or something, every time they make a movie with Black people, it’s always a period piece. Have you noticed this? No one knows how to imagine a Black present and definitely not a Black future. In movies about the future, everyone’s always white.
We have something that should be very simple. It just shouldn’t be very political at all. But even the idea of specifically Black American people gathering, it’s always under threat. Again, this is not usually explicitly the topic of my work, because I’m often interested in other things. But this show, because it is in the United States, I think it’s almost more personal, because I live here. But I think that when I think of the context of how my work has often been in other places—yes, I am an American, but my career is not really a super American career.
CT
What do you mean by that?
KO
This is not unique to me. I have a lot of friends that are like this. I went to school in New York, and I’m an American person, but people started paying attention when I started showing in Europe.
And I think it’s, again, if you want to talk about me as a Black person, if you think about James Baldwin and him traveling to Paris, he always says, like, “Whatever can happen to me in these other countries, it will never be worse than what’s happening in the United States.” But I also think that you have to remember that, in the United States now, Black art is very popular. But all these years before this, it was really weird how unpopular it was in the United States.
It’s such a strange thing to look back on, because you really have to ask yourself, “Does it mean that this is now a trend as well?” And you have to understand that this trend is now, what, five years old or something like this? And so even the idea of me doing this show here and making a show about race in New York, it’s almost too late. It’s out of fashion already, right? It’s cheesy. But for me, I’m like, “Well, I live here and I’m here and I’m Brown, and so here’s a show that actually is thinking about the racial experience.”
Kayode Ojo (b. 1990, Cookeville, TN) is a New York-based artist whose practice focuses on sculptural installation and readymade materials. His latest exhibition, “Eden,” is currently on view at 52 Walker, New York, through 7 January 2024.
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are a curatorial duo. Their current projects include “Paris Orbital,” a public program at the Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce. In October 2023, they organized the Paris+ Conversations program at Centre Pompidou.
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK SETHI
INTERVIEW BY PIERRE-ALEXANDRE MATEOS AND CHARLES TEYSSOU