Charo Oquet is a multidisciplinary Afro-Caribbean artist whose practice embraces the memory, energetic connection, and vocabulary of her complex heritage, global experiences, and ancestral research. Born in the Dominican Republic during the final years of the Trujillo Dictatorship, Oquet moved throughout the country’s villages and cities with her mother, of mixed African, Taíno, and Jewish descent, and her father, whose lineage includes Lebanese, Spanish, and French roots. Through these journeys and as an adult, Oquet experienced the rich synthesis of Hispaniola’s past and traditions. With allusions to Gagá festivals, home, and the body, Oquet constructs immersive environments – works that extend beyond sculpture or painting in a ritual gesture.
I Am Here: Fragments, Trances, and Improvised Architectures (2026) is a site-specific installation featuring bound and spiraling forms, reconstructed canvases, and spontaneous drawings. Through these elements, Oquet explores cycles of growth through creation, erasure, and renewal, transforming materials in surprising ways and inviting the viewer to step into a moment infused with radical hope and the possibility of soulful healing.
Oquet envisions her installation as a living system. The central structure serves as a backbone, while the body emerges through intentionally placed sculptures. Drawings and abstract paintings extend outward, like limbs reaching across the walls. Ephemeral marks serve as an invocation to heal the soul and to inscribe Oquet’s energetic affirmation, “I am here,” within the gallery, the installation, our world, and this very moment. Organically collaged canvases suggest the contour of the human brain, alight with firing, vivid neurons that channel the mind to prepare to enter a space between the sacred and the mundane.
Oquet beckons the viewer to enter the gallery, following their own impulses toward a radiant center – a sculpture that serves as the axis mundi. The viewer’s body is compelled to move through the space fully engaged with the installation. The atmosphere Oquet creates evokes the pulsing music, extravagant garments, enraptured dance, and language of Vodun Gagá processions in the Dominican Republic. By referencing these events, born of the merging of Rara tradition brought by Haitian laborers in the sugar cane industry, the artist inspires a sense of communal empowerment and shared joy.
Oquet’s sculptures cite improvised structures throughout the island of Hispaniola – shelters and buildings that emerge from necessity, built upward from limited materials, and later reconfigured for their next use. She instinctively constructs and embellishes her works with electrifying colors and wrapped forms that teeter elusively between order and chaos – recomposing earlier pieces anew as “life itself is not orderly or complete. It is precisely instability that allows transformation to occur.” Her sculptures signal the same resilience and evolution as the monuments that have inspired her.
The visual language of Oquet’s sculptures is inspired by a fusion of Nkisi Nkondi (Power Sculptures of the Kongo people meant to reinforce positive action) and Paquet Kongo (from Haitian Vodun, a sacred bundle infused with healing qualities). These influences manifest in Oquet’s material choices: weathered metal and hammered nails, as well as tactile fabric, lustrous gold, and glistening sequins. These elements give rise to and are symbolically wrapped around the form, like an umbilical cord linking the body to its ancestry.
Charo Oquet’s I Am Here: Fragments, Trances, and Improvised Architectures (2026) installation proposes that we embrace transformation and build social and spiritual energetic communal bonds, toward the promise of luminous endurance, bringing about radical hope and joy, even amid times of instability.
