Ima-Abasi Okon Disturbs the Myth of the Artist

In Ima-Abasi Okon’s short film, Capture Mechanism Bypass for Surplus – aChoreographic-Logic-Complex Dub (anticipatory talk back) (2018), we follow a young Black man through a rugged, mountainous landscape. He is wearing a bright yellow Supreme x The North Face anorak emblazoned with the words: ‘By Any Means Necessary’. The phrase is a translation of Frantz Fanon’s 1960 address to the Positive Action Conference in Accra, but entered popular culture in 1965 through Malcolm X, who used it often in speeches, preceded by the words ‘freedom’, ‘action’, ‘justice’ or ‘equality’. We stay close to the screen and the camera stays close to his back, honing in on the words on his jacket and their stark conflation of radical politics, art, hyper-coveted streetwear and outdoorsy merchandising. Like the Rückenfigur – the lone character often depicted from behind in Romantic paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c.1818) – Okon’s protagonist blocks our view even as he identifies our position as viewers. His microphone buffeted by wind and the attenuated creasing of high-performance fabric, this slow walker sets our pace not only through the familiar terrain of these islands, but also through the exhibition.

Spanning the main room of Derry’s Void Gallery – where Okon’s exhibition, ‘sur— [infinite Slippage: production of the r ~e ~a ~l as an intensive magnitude starting at zero-eight] —plus’, has been extended post-lockdown – is a row of 11 industrial air-conditioning units connected by thick bunches of cables. As they drone and creak into life, they diffuse not only air but the sound of a radically slowed, instrumental version of Miguel’s 2012 romantic banger, ‘Adorn’. Deprived of its pacy erotic narrative, the track is plaintive, forlorn, disorienting, haunted, like the call and response of sad foghorns out in the bay. Okon’s distortion, <(A--------d--------o--------r--------n) (2019), inspired by the codeine-soaked chopped and screwed technique of record production made popular in Houston by DJ Screw in the early 1990s, is just one of the emblems of decelerated anti-productivity used in this show, as the artist traces the circulation of labour and commodity in complicated states of flow and arrest.

‘I’m on a go-slow,’ my former co-worker Olive used to announce immediately after finishing her lunch every day. Okon’s syntactically arresting titles reflect another form of industrial action or inaction. (Unbounded [sic]-Vibrational [sic] Always [sic]-on-the-Move [sic]) Praising Flesh (An _Extra aSubjective p,n,e,u,m,a-mode of Being T,o,g,e,t,h,e,r) (2019), for instance, is impossible to not say slowly and with attention. In a small room off the main space, Okon has dropped the ceiling using tiles of the sort found ‘where bureaucracy happens’, as the artist described them during an opening-night conversation with curator Taylor LeMelle. Here we find not only fluid and whispering commodities, but also gummy substances, jamming the mechanics. In light fittings handmade to look like expensive cut-crystal tumblers, a mixture of palm oil and Courvoisier casts a warm glow around the room. Ultrasound gel, morphine, insulin and gold sprinkles coat the tiles. Art appears here not only as grease to the wheels of a particular form of capital circulation and the artist’s participation in it, but also as glitter in the lube or sugar in the tank, disturbing the mythical flow of effortless identification with one’s own work.

^{Main image: Ima-Abasi Okon, 'sur— [infinite Slippage: production of the r ~e ~a ~l as an intensive magnitude starting at zero-eight] —plus, 2020, installation view, Void Gallery, Derry, 2020. Commissioned and produced by Void Gallery, Derry, in partnership with Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Tansy Cowley}