Nari Ward gathers stories from objects and places, transforming them into powerful narratives. The materials he chooses – whether discarded strollers, shoelaces, worn f irehoses, or cotton balls – carry layered histories and echoes of lived experiences. Like an archaeologist of the everyday, Ward excavates remnants of consumer culture, societal trauma, and diasporic stories, exposing tensions between memory and forgetting, identity and belonging. Through his multidisciplinary and inventive practice, he converts these abandoned relics into spaces of reflection and reclamation, bridging personal and collective memory, private and public stories, and addressing questions of social justice, power, and overlooked histories.

Spring Seed (2025), his new project for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, traces the intangible cultural and commercial entanglements of Jamaica – where Ward was born and raised before migrating to New York at the age of twelve – Brazil, and Japan through the trajectory of coffee, a commodity deeply tied to labor economies, global consumerism, and colonial histories, yet equally associated with desire and leisure. At the center of the installation, an enclosed arena made of bedsprings houses a new video that interweaves footage from Ward’s trips to São Paulo’s Liberdade neighborhood (its Japanese-Brazilian community), Bahia, and Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee region. A symbol of luxury and exclusivity, Blue Mountain coffee is cultivated in small quantities, with most of its production exported to Japan, where it is prized for its rarity and refinement. Within this intimate space, which viewers need to enter, an altar-like speaker system, draped in ironed cotton covers infused with Blue Mountain coffee grinds, functions as both a sculptural and multi-sensorial element, layering sound recordings from São Paulo’s Chapel of Our Lady of Souls of the Afflicted – built on an ancestral Black and Indigenous gravesite. These sonic and visual textures resonate with Ward’s earlier works, such as the video Spellbound (2015), which explored Savannah, Georgia’s fraught histories of slavery, colonialism, resilience, and emancipation.

Through his charged assemblages, Ward not only reclaims discarded materials but also reimagines the potential they carry. Spring Seed extends this ongoing exploration into collectivity, mapping unseen flows and exchanges while complicating dominant narratives. By weaving together visual language, sound, and scent, and by employing moving images – a medium inherently capable of traversing time and space – Ward embraces a non-linear approach that activates the viewers’ imagination, revealing the energies and hidden forces that shape a sense of community and belonging. In doing so, he creates a space where memory resists erasure, and the past speaks powerfully to the present – just as a seed springs to life.