Mimi Ọnụọha’s interest in technological infrastructures was initially sparked by questions of sexual and bodily self-determination. In an early experiment titled 69* (2014), the artist began handing out a mobile number to men who sexually harrassed her on the street. Instead of a romantic encounter, those who texted engaged a defiant chatbot that held the men accountable. Realizing she had suddenly become a contributor to the mechanisms of data collection, the work prompted a deeper inquiry into the absences and biases within digital datasets. What invisible relations do they contain, how do they navigate and shape bodies and their access to public space? Works such as The Library of Missing Datasets (2016) are key materializations of grappling with what Ọnụọha has come to name ‘algorithmic violence’: the power relations inherent to a seemingly objective collection. Why was there no data on the number of Black civilians killed by law enforcement officers in the US, when crime and policing are avenues that continuously justify the mass collection and storage of data? Ọnụọha’s work seeks to make these omissions visible, exposing how absence itself becomes a form of presence in the lives of those marginalized by data-driven systems. This contextual approach underpins the work she presents in Global Fascisms: These Networks In Our Skin (2021). Here, the artist targets the material infrastructure of the internet—represented by cables—and shows African women attempting to recode and dismantle the algorithmic violence inscribed into them. Inspired by Igbo cosmology, the speculative video work accompanies the women as they unmake and remake informational infrastructures through braiding cables and rehearsing songs of resistance.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION: These Networks In Our Skin (2021), 1-channel video, colour, sound, 5' 47". Courtesy of the artist