#82 Girl, the World is Big

During Museumnacht, Ndayé Kouagou transforms Buro Stedelijk into a space of gentle destabilization and collective questioning. Moving beyond his earlier solitary performances, Kouagou’s practice now embraces multiple voices and bodies, creating what Édouard Glissant might recognize as an exercise in donner-avec – giving-with rather than explaining or justifying.

The artist’s expanded performative vocabulary embodies a “politics of presence” that reveals the political through being rather than declaration. His work operates in a peculiar temporal space, simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, challenging linear progressions and fixed categories. Through collaborative performance, Kouagou explores Black identity not as a predetermined concept but as an unfolding series of stories and possibilities.

Rather than providing answers, this manifestation transforms Buro Stedelijk’s Central Space into a mirror, reflecting back visitors’ own assumptions while creating dreamscapes where the venue’s familiar architecture becomes a stage for the unfamiliar. The space’s openness becomes crucial to Kouagou’s method allowing viewers to move through and around the performance. Positioning themselves as both observers and participants within the work. In an era demanding immediate transparency, Kouagou’s practice offers something more radical: an invitation to productive uncertainty, where the most profound engagement emerges through the comfort of not knowing.

This evening presents art not as spectacle but as encounter – a space where multiple perspectives converge in polyphonic dialogue, resisting the singular in favor of the layered and complex.