Gemisch aus Sand und Sonne // Kayo Goede

In the organizer's words:

We cordially invite you to our opening on May 8, 2025 at 6 pm at Baustelle Schaustelle Essen.

Kayo Goede (no pronouns, *1993) is an interdisciplinary artist whose artistic practice moves between site-specific installations, stage design, performance, drawing and photography. In the summer of 2024, Kayo graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy as a master student of Lena Newton. The graduation room "TO GATHER PLACE", collectively curated with Margareta Bartelmeß and Robert Rickli, was awarded the prize for graduates of the art academy.

Working both individually and collectively, Kayo views art-making as an act of merging, encountering and influencing. Out of an attraction to a certain material, a connection is made to the architectural and lighting conditions of a space. In these, mostly constructed spaces of encounter open up, providing a stage for the different qualities of materials. Just by looking at them and being surrounded by them, a sensual-physical experience is triggered. Places are created that invite an encounter between human and non-human existence. Kayo sees the material used as a partner that also sets impulses, just as her own initiation of ideas and other human cooperation partners do. The aim is to make this effectiveness of non-human materials visible and tangible.

Kayo's spatial works are characterized by a simplicity of construction. This keeps the focus back on the material in order to get as close as possible to the essence of its being. This simplicity creates a calm that invites you to enjoy the moment of encounter in attentive silence.
Kayo's sculptural objects are reminiscent of architectures with a more original construction method, which at the same time appear essential. Walls of interwoven grasses, rooms without roofs, light fabrics that suggest a room or just a niche. Translucent and yet dense enough to feel securely located. The changing processes of (natural) materials are reminders of the constant emergence and decay that should also not be ignored in art production, according to Kayo's view.

Kayo questions the human notion of a lifeless and separate environment whose sole purpose is to serve as a resource for human needs. From this perspective, artistic practice is seen as a kind of necessary reconceptualization
of our relationships with all entities (forms of existence on earth), in which interdependence and mutual care are included.

With an unadulterated intention, Kayo manages to tell stories about the fascination and vulnerability of material phenomena, landscape memories, coincidences, vitality and transience through a visual and spatial language. There is a strong belief in the power of art-making to create spaces that have the ability to bring people together and offer the potential for shared socio-political reflection.

Kayo has been exhibiting regularly in the NRW area for four years, with group exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects in cooperation with Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Kunstpalast, Augustiner Museum in Austria, BBK Düsseldorf, Tanzstation Barmer Bahnhof and Cheers for Fears. In May 2025, Kayo will be exhibiting with the newly founded group
EXO at the Kunsthausessen.