Image: sweat variant, ‘let slip, hold sway’, performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2025. Pictured: Okwui Okpokwasili and Kris Lee. Photo: Maria Baranova.
‘sweat variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born): where you go full, volume 5’ opens at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, on 20 September 2026 and remains in the galleries until 24 January 2027. Admission is free for all audiences.
The installation is organised by the Wexner Center and curated by Curator of Exhibitions Rebecca Lowery, and it is co-commissioned by the Wexner Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. It carries the collective practice of sweat variant — Okpokwasili, a performer, choreographer and writer, and Born, a designer, writer and composer — out of the theatre and into the gallery, where the centre describes an immersive landscape of embodied memory for visitors to move through, with the performers’ bodies transmitting emotion and experience through movement.
The work grows out of the physical research behind ‘adaku, part 2’, which has its world premiere at the Wexner Center in October 2026. Okpokwasili and Born are credited as directors, with performers Bria Bacon, Kris Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ny Opong and AJ Wilmore, video by Kearra Gopee and cinematography by Oresti Tsonopoulos and Alex Munro.
The exhibition is one of four autumn presentations introduced at the centre’s Fall 2026 Exhibitions Opening Celebration on Friday 18 September, 4–8pm, for which free tickets are offered. Sharing the galleries are ‘Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues’, curated by Head of Visual Arts Julieta González, and ‘Temitayo Ogunbiyi: You will have revelations along felled branches and longer roots/routes’, organised by The Arts Club of Chicago with elements of a presentation organised by The Noguchi Museum; ‘Léonard Pongo: Tales from the Source’ is shown in the box.
The Wexner Center is at The Ohio State University, 1871 North High Street, Columbus. Its High Street entrance is closed for paver repair, with the accessible entrance near College Road open.
