VASE: Yoshua Okón

The School of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) lecture series will kick off its 2025-26 season with Yoshua Okón, a Mexico City artist who blends video, installation and performance to engage viewers in a dialogue concerning the complexity of contemporary society.

His free, hour-long talk will be held Thursday, Oct. 16, at 5:30 p.m. at the Center for Creative Photography auditorium, 1030 N. Olive Road.

Okón received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship and co-founded SOMA, an artist-run school in Mexico City dedicated to cultural exchange and the teaching of the arts. His work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality.

His solo shows exhibitions include Yoshua Okón: Collateral, MUAC, Mexico City and Amparo Museum, Puebla; Yoshua Okón, Ghebaly Gallery, LA; Yoshua Okón: In the Land of Ownership, ASAKUSA Tokyo; Salò Island, UC Irvine, Irvine; Piovra, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Poulpe, Mor Charpentier, Paris; Octopus, Cornerhouse, Manchester and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and SUBTITLE, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich.

Okón’s group exhibitions include: Manifesta 11, Zurich; Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Antes de la resaca, MUAC, Mexico City; Incongruous, Musèe Cantonal des Beux-Arts, Lausanne; The Mole´s Horizon, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre; Amateurs, CCA Wattis; San Francisco; Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London; Adaptive Behavior, New Museum, NY and Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values, PS1, MoMA, NY, and Kunstwerke, Berlin.

His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Colección Jumex and MUAC, among others.

• Website: https://site.yoshuaokon.net/
• Instagram: @yoshuaokon.studio