ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Hailing from west London, Barakat Omomayowa is a British-Nigerian creative whose interest in the arts began sitting in the theatre ‘watching how a story could move people, then realising those stories weren’t always ours’. She’s been finding ways to tell them ever since; initially through ballet, in which she is classically trained, then through acting, which she did for ten years, and now through curation. 

Barakat first came to Coombe as part of a cohort of cultural programmers as part of Southbank Centre Presents, supported by BAFTA-winning producer Tobi Kyeremateng, in August 2025. The programme enables nine cultural programmers to gain valuable real-life experience as they develop their own cultural toolkit and is part of a programme which gives them the opportunity to develop practical skills and theoretical approaches to cultural curation with support and insights from practitioners across a variety of art-forms. 

Omomayowa returns to Coombe with'KKIVE' (Kitchen Archive) an active practice in paying attention. Rooted in kitchens, it moves slowly, gathering stories, gestures, and fragments of daily life that often go unrecorded. With each edition, the KKIVE team spends time with one muse: a creative whose relationship with food, memory, and space reveals something honest about how we live and where we come from.They use photography, conversation, and collaborative making to build a portrait that’s not just about what’s cooked, but how the kitchen is lived in. These are the soft politics of the everyday, how a countertop holds history, how recipes migrate, how the task of feeding someone becomes a kind of love letter or an act of resistance.

Omomayowa is particularly interested in art that ‘sits in the in between; textiles, image, sound, food, gathering. Anything that holds tension, memory, and care at once’. And finds herself influenced by ‘everyday people who remix, make do, and imagine better futures out of scraps’. She sees curating as ‘a way of creating space that other people can enter where I didn’t see any,’ and is particularly drawn to the alchemy of the medium in which ‘you take fragments, stories, rage, softness, joy, and bring people into conversation with them’.

We’re delighted to have Barakat and KKIVE with us.