Mimi Ọnụọha

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Angela He • Bayan Kiwan • Caroline Sinders • Death, Sex & Money • Kaho Abe • Katia Repina • Lam Thuy Vo • Lauren Lee McCarthy • Mickalene Thomas • Mimi Ọnụọha • Tamiko Thiel • Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne • The Cut

Us, Aggregated 2.0 (2018)

Installation shot of images installed on a wall depicting women of all ages

Us, Aggregated 2.0 uses Google’s reverse-image search algorithms to hint at questions of power, community, and identity. The work presents a series of photographs of women in frame cluster, with an image of the artist’s mother at the center. Viewed together, the photographs evoke a sensation of family and community that belies the fact that the remaining subjects are randomly assorted, thrown together by algorithms from Google that have tagged each of the images as “girl” and labeled them all as similar. Thus community is assembled, manufacturing an aggregation of “us”.

A woman sits on a chair with a neon sculpture behind her. She is smiling at the ground and is wearing a colorful shirt.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation and video to call attention to the ways in which those in the margins are differently abstracted, represented, and missed by sociotechnical systems.

Ọnụọha has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University, and the Royal College of Art. Her exhibition and speaking credits include venues like La Gaitê Lyrique (France), FIBER Festival (Netherlands), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), Le Centre Pompidou (France) and B4BEL4B Gallery (San Francisco). Her writing has appeared in Quartz, Nichons-nous Dans L’Internet, FiveThirtyEight, and K. Verlag. In 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows, and in 2017 she was nominated as a Technical.ly Brooklyn Artist of the Year.

Ọnụọha earned her MPS from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2018-19 she served as Creative-in-Residence at Olin College for Engineering. She is a Visiting Arts Professor at NYU Tisch.

Visit her website here.