Jojo Abot’s unmistakable and inimitable vision eats boundaries for breakfast. Her multidimensional practice encompasses but is not limited to music, video, performance and visual art, photography, and a sense of sartorialism, maquillage, and adornment that is like if fashion went shamanistic supernova. She is, in short, her own total work of art. And she does all this with a healing perspective on her ancestral lineage as an Ewe woman, born in Ghana and a true citizen of the world, the better to spread higher love vibrations in her own soul and throughout the human collective.
As a musician, beyond her extensive and expansive personal discography, Abot has toured with Ms. Lauryn Hill and enlivened audiences at Afropunk, Radio City Music Hall, the Apollo, the Greek, and more. As a composer, she’s working on an original interdisciplinary opera right now. Her previous live interdisciplinary opera Even in the Dark was performed at Redcat in 2023 and featured dancers, vocalists including Esperanza Spaulding, and a monumental video projection showing the regaled and regal artist in scenarios amidst the backdrop of her beloved West African landscapes.
In fact, it is in her video work—in which the distinctions between “music video” and “video art” become truly meaningless—that her star shines in all its facets. Her energy as performer is electric, as her hyperchromatic, maximally textured and patterned clothes, makeup, and jewelry set off her syncopated, celestial, soulful songs. Everything with Abot is a ritual, an activation, an opportunity to transcend the everyday for something impossibly vibrant. One such work—the affecting call to integration and collective healing, Re.Member—was featured at 2024’s LUMINEX, an outdoor video art festival projected across the buildings of Downtown L.A.
Her visual art exists in this continuum, across celebrated institutional collaborations including MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Ghana Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia—and last year in Los Angeles at LA Louver. A God of Her Own Making—her solo exhibition at the gallery in 2024, and also the name of the new “immersive spatial opera,” already being shared in segments online—incorporated all these elements but crucially contextualized within an array of sculpture, textiles, film, spatial sound, painting, and performance centered around her salient, ancestrally activated ideas “on the transformative and sacred power of the divine feminine, inspiring conversations around collective elevation and engagement with our spiritual selves.”
