The Family Portrait (2025)
“……Family means many things to different people. Familie bedeutet für jeden etwas anderes. One thing remains…..there is a tussle between love and hate. Running away from kindreds and yet permanently bound by the bloodline. Solidarität, Liebe, Zusammengehörigkeit … Harmonie, Schutz Nun, was soll ich sagen, es ist ein Kampf zwischen Hass und Liebe……”
-Excerpts from Kezia Ouomoye’s cogitations [7/28/2025]
As a participant “of my family,” I perceive the family unit I grew up in as a system of origin which contributed to what shaped my lived experiences and existence today. Am I permanently married to that system? Absolutely not. Growing up, I was dependent on my parents, guardians, siblings, and, like many young adults, gradually broke off from the original family unit to build my own. But the connection with family is still there, and the stories are still very much alive within that system of origin.
“ The Family Portrait” is embellished with elements of improvisation and theatrics, a narrative structure that unveils characters and plot to fabricate different forms that hope to unlock emotional connections, transmit cultural aspects, traditions and pockets of knowledge. It is a sensory biography written utilizing Sculptural assemblages, constructed objects made of reconfigured wooden parts, positioned as a cultural artefact representing domestic life or traditional craftsmanship.
I define my sculptural forms as storytelling devices, narrative objects through which I coin real-life events and characters from my family. These storytelling devices are inspired by German dollhouses. The dollhouse, with its miniature walls and imagined inhabitants, unfolds as both material and metaphor. In 16th-century Northern Europe, these exquisite constructions were not toys but wonders of craftsmanship—a wunderkammer that mirrored wealth, power, and domestic ideals. Each tiny room whispered of status and discipline, training young girls in the silent script of domestic virtue. Over time, the dollhouse descended from marvel to toy, democratised yet never stripped of meaning, still carrying within its delicate frames the cultural codes of home, order, and aspiration. These symbolisms and elements within the dollhouses provide space for me to reimagine new possibilities of creating visual forms and expressions.
My work revisits the dollhouse—a childhood object of play in Germany—as a critical and creative site. These structures become speculative theatres where family narrative, critique, and imagined futures intersect. In dialogue, I engage African doll traditions, where fertility dolls serve as vessels of ritual and intergenerational memory and toys. Both play roles as spiritual and pedagogical, exposing layered systems of value. The dolls are constructed with fabric, copper and other industrial materials, each doll assigned outfits carefully sewn to fit the given narrative.
Current Exhibition:
“The writings on the wall” is currently on view at SCCA Tamale, Ghana
Year
September 13, 2025 – March 14, 2026
Reality television has become a cultural force precisely because it presents itself as “real.” But its narratives are carefully engineered by producers through editing and manipulation. Hours of raw life are distilled into archetypes—heroes, villains, underdogs—designed to heighten drama and sustain viewership.
Behind every episode lies an intricate system of control, editing, and manipulation engineered by producers who craft stories from raw human interaction. In this process, participants are stripped of complexity and recast as consumable characters for entertainment.
In many ways, my role as a Tale-weaver mirrors this invisible hand. In” The Family Portrait”, I engage with the family archive as a speculative realm, transforming relatives into sci-fi avatars built from fragments of memory, caricature, voice notes, costume, and imagination. Like a producer, I reconstruct the raw material of real life into storylines—distilling intimacy into archetypes, reframing the past through invention.
“ I now make the rules, I connect the cables and turn the lights on. It’s my show.”
Excerpts from Kezia Ouomoye’s Cogitations [8 /21/2025]
If the reality TV producer flattens people into consumable characters, my practice insists on the opposite: to restore multiplicity and allow for contradiction. The family archive becomes not only a spectacle but a constellation, where dolls, miniatures, and fragments each speak with layered voices across time. Rather than simplify, the work holds space for plurality—where many truths coexist within a single frame.
Post-Play Machines
Post-Play Machines is a series of kinetic sculptures created from discarded wooden fragments, found objects, and simple electronic and lighting elements. Each figure — simultaneously creature, toy, wooden beings and machine — is constructed through an improvisational process that privileges intuition, experimentation, and play. Their bodies, made of salvaged wood and industrial remnants, are embedded with mechanisms that set certain limbs or heads in motion. Through these small, almost hesitant movements, they evoke questions of life, presence, and the blurred boundaries between human, object, and environment.
Post-Play Machines
Year
2019-2020
The work reimagines discarded materials as carriers of new vitality. By wiring fragments of the mundane into animated forms, I seek to activate narratives about waste and renewal. Each sculpture’s motion — however minimal — becomes a metaphor for ontological engagement. The light elements further amplify this sense of reanimation, producing shifting atmospheres that give the works both a mechanical and spiritual pulse.
Developed within a framework of sustainability and poetic invention, Post-Play Machines is a inquiry into storytelling through objects. My practice often engages assemblage and narrative construction as ways of revisiting archives — personal, cultural, and material. Here, movement functions as both literal and symbolic gesture: a reminder that even in stillness or neglect, there is potential for becoming.
keziaouomoye.com 