Artist talk with Kayo Mpoyi, year 2023

Kayo Mpoyi was born in 1986, in Zaire, today’s Congo-Kinshasa.
Kayo is an artist, writer and educator based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Her artistic practice is based on memories and heritage, both factual and fictional, which constitute a memory work where gaps in both her own history and that of others are filled in. Through her work, Kayo creates a visibility to the voices and stories that are hidden in family photo albums or in the objects that are found in state archives or museum collections, whose stories never been told. Her artistic methods reveal new layers of knowledge and understanding in a coded memory systems. Kayo’s artistic expression moves across a range of media including text, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting and print.

‘I have worked a lot with the silence of history. I think it’s as if I’m doing a kind of archaeology, an excavation where my thoughts, dreams and feelings are echoes, remnants, reflections of those / what came before me /../’

Kayo received the Catapult Prize for the best debut novel ‘Mai means water’, a childhood story set in Congolese exile in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in year of 2019. Kayo Mpoyi studies fine art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. She won the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Palace of Stockholm’s scholarship competition in year 2022. Kayo has, among other things, had public art assignments in Jordbro Centrum, participated in the exhibition series 3.5% Over Generations and had a solo exhibition in Orsa Kulturhus. In the summer of 2022, Kayo made her debut as a children’s author with the picture book ‘Kitoko’ and in the autumn of the same year, a second adult novel, ‘An Exercise in Revolution’, was published.

Photographer : Kajsa Göransson

Art curator:
Sarah Svärd Tawiah