Exhibition texts

Mimi Ọnụọha’s art frames technology as a site that embodies cultural logics of knowledge and difference, as shaped by historical and colonial encounters. Her work points to the contradictions inherent in the premise of technological “progress” and illuminates a path for a more expansive understanding of technology that embraces the traditions and values of those whose histories have been erased in the name of development.

These Networks in Our Skin

These Networks in Our Skin (2021) is a short film showing people reclaiming their own traditional narratives using the cables and devices of the internet. Driven by evocative imagery and sounds, the film is inspired by lgbo cosmology. In some lgbo traditions, Ala, the goddess of the land and everything below it, intervenes in human activities, and is supplicated by works of art and gifts. The women in Ọnụọha’s film loosely adapt lgbo and other cosmologies to the digital infrastructure that surrounds us. By rewiring and reweaving the material realities of the Internet to re­ flect their own presences, they reconfigure it to embrace their own cultural beliefs and values.

The Cloth in the Cable

In the installation The Cloth in the Cable (2022), Ọnụọha embeds cables with spices, cloth, dust, yellow madras curry pepper, smoked paprika, ground calabash nutmeg and other materials, rewired with new meanings and ontologies. The work extends the Internet’s history and symbolises its presence and power over spaces and stories. For the Berlin version of this installation, Ọnụọha invited Berlin-based writer, poet and community organiser hn. lyonga - the Gropius Bau’s Neighbour in Residence 2023 – to embellish the work with a local and site –specific addition of broom fibers.

Ọnụọha focuses on the absences created by computational and data infrastructure - on what is left out rather than typically seen. Yet, her work corrects what she has called “algorithmic violence” - or the exclusive and repressive tendencies within technology - by creating new spaces of care, inclusion and connectivity.

Patricia Domínguez’s works explore ecological myth-making, multispecies relationships and digitisation of life under corporatied, late capitalism. Through sculpture, video, publications and educational projects inspired by her research on ethnobotany and healing practices, Domínguez views art as a tool for decolonial emancipation to transcend and resist today’s neoliberal condition.

The works explore various dimensions of spiritual and non-human intelligences. Derived from research from residency at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and from exchange and learning with Chilean healers, the video Holographic Milk (2021) takes viewers on an inner discovery through spirituality, ecological prophecies and quantum physics. Structured as a meditative prayer and supplication, the video engages with organic matter as its own information system.

Madre Drone (2019-2020) originates from the artist's first-hand accounts of experiences in the region of Chiquitania in Bolivia: the rise of Amazon fires and the protests that took place a month later in adjacent Chile left behind devastated habitats and animals, while protesters were made blind through police violence. The work serves as an invocation of a new way of being that merges technology and planetary memory. Depicting a realm of plants and natural beings involving a woman­serpent, a blind toucan, psychedelic cacti and anti-drone laser lights, Madre Drone ultimately summons us to witness a shamanistic experience amid visionary, interwoven worlds. It is an invitation to think about our relationship with machines and plants and what we can learn with regard to Artificial Intelligence.