Kevin Osepa: Ocho Día. Eight Days, Nine Nights

EXHIBITION
11/06 – 06/09
Museum of Contemporary Art

Exhibition opening: 11/06 @ 8 pm

Curator: Daria Tuminas

Ocho Día. Eight Days, Nine Nights is guided by Osepa’s ongoing research into the gradual loss of ritual tradition in Curaçao, the island of his birth. The artist’s work revisits practices of collective mourning and spiritual gathering, engaging themes of absence, memory, and longing within a postcolonial context. Drawing on Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions—and interweaving Roman Catholic, Congolese, and Yoruba influences—Osepa creates immersive environments where the boundaries between the everyday and the sacred dissolve.

For this site-specific installation, Osepa combines his Lusgarda video work with photography, personal objects and artefacts. Together, they form a “third space” that functions as a site of gathering, somewhere between a home and a temple. Within this liminal setting, everyday objects become altars and visitors are invited into a contemplative encounter with grief and remembrance.

Presented within the curatorial framework of Organ Vida’s 2026 theme, Happy Spiraling, Osepa’s work offers a counterpoint to a contemporary image culture defined by speed and excess. His installations resist rapid consumption, instead cultivating duration, attention, and embodied presence.

Osepa’s work has been exhibited at major institutions in the Netherlands, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. He has received numerous awards, including the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize (2018), the Golden Calf for Best Short Film (2022), the DDG Award for Best Short Fiction (2023), the Amsterdam Art Prize (2023), and the Prix de Rome Visual Arts (2025).

Ocho Día. Eight Days, Nine Nights is the artist’s first solo exhibition abroad, realized in collaboration between FOTODOK and Organ Vida, and curated by Daria Tuminas.