Artists

Mimi Ọnụọha

Press release

Mimi Ọnụọha, a Nigerian-American artist, engages with the promises of technological progress and the logics of data accumulation in her works. Fascinated by the detailed recording of individuals in industrialized societies aimed at categorizing the population to make it ultimately predictable, the artist focuses on interstices, on hard-to-read phenomena or gaps. Through her multimedia practice, Ọnụọha makes existing and incomplete data tangible in their reality-creating function. Data not only represent facets of our history, present, and future, but they also create a world that adapts to them. Through her works in the form of codes, prints, installations, and videos, the artist explores how power dynamics arise and solidify. She directs her gaze towards cultural, historical, ecological, and digital contexts, making the close interconnections of racism and power visible. The conscious suppression of socioeconomic insights by state authorities can be understood as subtle forms of racist violence, just as the categorization of individuals into specific groups by algorithms serving tech giants. By questioning the contradictions of technological progress, Mimi Ọnụọha highlights the false separation between nature, culture, and technology. In doing so, she opens a space that tells how contemporary technological infrastructures might look if not only Western profit logics played a role in their implementation, but also the philosophical and cultural values of communities that have been marginalized.