NEW YORK, NY.- bitforms is presenting Mimi Ọnụọha’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Everything That Didn’t Fit. Ọnụọha draws attention to the quotidian logic of the technocolonial, a logic that results in certain experiences, people, histories, and sensations falling outside of contemporary systems of digital data collection. In a society where that which cannot be documented, recorded, or proven does not carry weight, Everything That Didn’t Fit is an ode to absence, and a call to undo and expand the categories of value that inform modern sociotechnical systems.
Artist Statement:
My first real art intervention was nearly a decade ago, when I spent a summer giving every man who catcalled me a slip of paper with a phone number on it.
In a sense, the phone number was mine. But it was also a number I had connected to a distant server and pre-programmed to respond to any messages it received with stock handcrafted replies. These messages ranged from maudlin to indignant, but in that time before bots and smart home systems, it felt liberating to program a computer to send words I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. As the summer went on, the words the men sent me in return—messages that were alternately apologetic and dismissive—stopped mattering. What became more pressing was the artifact that emerged from the project, a thing I had never set out to create: a list of all of my catcallers’ phone numbers.
What appeared a simple list was so much more. That dataset held the sweaty dread that gripped me when I approached the men, the intimacy of watching halfway-programmed conversations with strangers spring to life before my eyes; the dark thrill of feeling like I finally had the upper hand by forming these men into a list I could pretend to control; the doubt in wondering if it was fair to have it in the first place.
And of course, the understanding that no one else would ever know the weight the dataset carried for me. To anyone else, it was just a list of numbers. To the men caught up in it, it was a grouping they didn’t know they composed.
My work has evolved from that intervention, but I can trace so much back to it. My practice is about what it means for the world to be turned into data, whether by accident or intention. The experiences of those in the undercommons — we who are Black, brown, immigrants, or caught between categories — especially reveal the implications of data collection. Computation precision brings potentials and costs that are unequally shared. I’m examining a web of ever-changing relations, relations in and between social structures, colonial realities, the natural world, and the global order that modernity has ushered in. For me, to talk about tech is to talk about the facts of social relationships: that social systems maintain and undermine computational structures; that archives render labor invisible; that histories of violence manifest in banality.
I find the answers to these questions often lie in patterns of absences. They lie in things that have been lost, removed, and submerged. Most of my work begins with a foray into a historical/present-day site or moment—surfacing a story, creating a dataset, finding an archive—that results in diverse forms, prints, installations, videos, websites, text. The questions are not confined to one field, and nor are the outputs. I often create multiple versions of pieces, each iteration highlighting new threads. In searching for the gaps, I’m searching for traces that suggest a different way of living.
– Mimi Ọnụọha
