Biography
I want to use my work to make a change in society. In my art I try to make visible the jobs that are often overlooked, such as factory workers, drivers, and construction workers in the hope that I can bring light to the inequality they face.
Thierry Oussou (1988, Allada, Benin), is a visual and conceptual artist who lives and works between Amsterdam, Netherlands and Benin. He was a resident at the Rijksakademie in 2015-2016. After his training at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, he founded Studio Oussou, an international art residency platform in Ouidah, Abomey-Calavi, Benin.
He received the Tollman award for visual arts in 2018, as well as the 2023 Royal Award for Modern Painting and the Golden Lion for Best National Participation 18th International Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 with Brazil. He is nominated for the 2025 Prix de Rome Visual Arts prize.
Thierry Oussou’s practice centers on professions that are marginalised and often overlooked, such as cotton pickers, factory workers, and transport drivers. Through his paintings, installations, and performances he aims to shed light on the hidden forms of manual labour that uphold contemporary society.
Oussou operates his own cotton plantation with local workers, aiming to provide more humane conditions than large-scale industrial plantations. In his work he draws out the tension between the low market price of cotton compared to commodities like gold or oil, and the high human cost and effort that underpins its production.
In recent site-specific projects, Oussou has also engaged with local environments to provoke reflection over time. For his project Growing Poetics in Kasteel Wijlre, he planted a tree surrounded by benches so that visitors might observe its growth long after the exhibition concluded. At the Stellenbosch Triennale, Oussou transformed a vineyard into a conceptual installation, where he named vineyard rows after workers, contemporary art figures, and friends, deliberately planting ‘worker’s flags’ throughout the field to honor their contribution and reframe agricultural labour through an artistic lens.
Through these diverse projects Oussou makes visible what is hidden, whether histories buried in soil or the economies of labour that remain unseen. His practice cultivates more than artistic work; it fosters a growing community of practice that reframes Benin’s agricultural and craft traditions as sources of both cultural heritage and contemporary artistic expression.