For over forty years, Werewere-Liking has built a multifaceted career, giving rise to fluid and interconnected worlds. Her diverse creativity has been consistently recognized on an international scale. In 1992, she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. In 2000, she received the prestigious Prince Claus Award for her cultural contributions. In 2021, she was appointed Commander of the Ivorian Order of Cultural Merit.
Her visual works have been exhibited widely across the world and have recently been selected for the São Paulo Biennial (Brazil, 2025) and the International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (Italy, 2026).
« The work of Werewere Liking establishes a realm of powerful energies in which sculpture, word, and myth not only coexist but vibrate on the same ritualistic frequency. Liking’s creations, made from found, recycled, and re-signified elements, are not mere forms that occupy space: they are enchanted bodies, living inscriptions of memory and imagination. Her poems expand this experience, reconfiguring the relationship between language, matter, and spirituality, as if each fragment spoke the secret language of time.
Gathering, reassembling, re-invoking: these gestures intertwine as virtuous practices against forgetfulness. In Liking, the reimagining of the creative process is also a restructuring of creativity that pulses around community, collective growth, construction, and the search for meaning. The artist names this creative field as Ki-Yi Mbock, a concept from the Bassa tradition in Cameroon, referring to supreme universal knowledge. In this territory, just as in ancient times, art and life are inseparable: the creations do not merely occupy space, but reorganize it, converting experiences into portals of autonomy.
Her sculptures are not fixed archives, but mobile constellations, in which past, present, and future intertwine in a rhizome of multiple potentialities. Each piece breaks the historical linearity and establishes an expanded, dense vitality, in which what is rejected is reactivated as the elaboration of new cosmogonies, with overlapping narratives and politics. Here, the world does not present itself as a static given, but as an entity of infinite inscription. »
Nathalia Grilo, “Werewere-Liking”, translated from Portuguese by Sergio Maciel, in Not All Travellers Walk Roads Of Humanity as Practice, 36ª Bienal de São Paulo / 36th São Paulo Biennial: Exhibition, 228–229, São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2025