OCHI presents Translator’s Notes, a solo presentation of moving images by Providence-based artist Africanus Okokon. Presented in advance of Okokon’s forthcoming presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, the exhibition presents three films by Africanus Okokon: Nsibidi Loops (2020), Auction Block (2020), and .Srt (2019). Moving deftly between archival research, found footage, and material experimentation, the works on view explore storytelling, translation, and transmission across media, providing a generous introduction to Okokon’s singular visual language. 

For roughly 1,600 years, Nsibidi, an ideographic writing system from the Cross River region, has circulated across southeastern Nigeria, including within Ibibio communities tied to the artist’s paternal lineage. Okokon animates these symbols using pencil and paper to evoke a story told in code — a narrative leaked by a Nsibidi member to a researcher in the early twentieth century. On the accompanying right channel of Nsibidi Loops, the artist uses found YouTube footage, including the Nigerian reality drama series Fattening Room and artificial spoken word to “translate” the gnomic message of the left into a fragmented, staccato montage that moves in and out of legibility for contemporary audiences. The work engages the unstable and fraught terrain of translation, secrecy, and interpretation, showing how meaning shifts, fractures, and mutates as it circulates across cultures, while also implicating colonial knowledge systems that extracted, categorized, and destabilized Indigenous forms of communication.

In Auction Block, Okokon appropriates footage from the Christie’s July 1989 Tribal Art auction in London, where a Benin Bronze originating from objects looted during the British invasion of Benin in 1897 became the first work of African art to exceed one million pounds. The artist digitally processes the image and sound to disorient the moments leading to the sale. 

.Srt is an audio/visual performance that mobilizes a deeply personal archive—hand-edited 16mm film, family home videos, found YouTube footage, and live-mixed electronic sound—to interrogate cultural formation in the African Diaspora through mourning, language, cosmology, and death. Resisting easy classification as Afrofuturist or Afro-pessimist, the work instead grounds itself in the instability of history as something vaporous and unresolved, offering counter-abstractions rather than linear narratives. By reworking docufiction and ethnographic traditions, the artist positions themself simultaneously as subject and interlocutor, using a semi-autobiographical framework to process a culturally specific death understood as both possession and embodied refusal of colonial consciousness. Authorship is intentionally decentered: the film emerges through free association and an almost alchemical process in which meaning accrues rather than declares itself.

Formally, the project’s hauntological force is carried through its obsessive attention to media specificity and temporal dislocation. Analog and digital formats ricochet across generations—16mm to HD to DVD to VHS; synthetic text-to-speech to cassette to VHS—enacting Derrida’s “time out of joint” and echoing Mark Fisher’s writing on the metaphysics of decay. Material degradation, compression, and re-recording transform both image and voice, rendering history as breath: dispersed, ownerless, yet momentarily embodied. By suturing institutional ethnographic films, vernacular home movies, and online spiritual media into a single haunted assemblage, the work collapses past, present, and future into a resonant field where personal memory and collective trauma co-produce meaning. The result is not an explanation of history, but a lived negotiation with its ghosts.

______________________________________________

Africanus Okokon (b. 1989, Saint Paul, MN) received an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited at von ammon co in Washington, D.C.; and Perrotin, Hesse Flatow, Helena Anrather, Lyles and King, and Sean Kelly in New York, NY. In 2021, Okokon was awarded a NXTHVN Studio Fellowship. His work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Frieze, and Artforum. Okokon lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island where he is an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.