Art Reviews

Harold Offeh

11/11/15

Harold Offeh is an artist and curator whose work covers performance, participation, video and photography. He employs humour and explores aspects of contemporary culture, and recent research projects have explored Afro-futurism and the marketing of hair. We spoke to Harold ahead of his talk at SPIEL at Norwich Arts Centre on 10th December to find out what floats his boat.

How do you adapt your work to engage an audience when working in video performance? How do you think this differs from say a 2D artist?

I don’t know if I adapt it specifically. I guess I’m conscious of the audience's viewing experience. Video and performance are both time based and as a result you have to be aware of the conditions and context in which people are asked to spend time with the work. I guess the time based element is a big difference from the presentation of 2D work.

You graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2001 and spoke of your degree show and your taste of working within the industry, what advice would you give to newly graduated artists who are trying to get themselves out there?

I think it’s very difficult to give advice as there are so many paths to success and achievement in art. The nature of your work will often determine how you might operate and identify strategies to sustain yourself. However, I think it’s important to have a network of friends, peers, institutions and funders who you can draw on. It’s very difficult to work in isolation.

You use a lot of humour in your work as a way to connect with your audience and as a medium to communicate your message. Why do you believe it is such a good tool for expressing ideas of history and culture?

 I think humour can be very disarming. If we’re confronted with things that are difficult or problematic we can often shut down, block things out or become defensive. Humour and the comic absurd can allow people to respond immediately, there isn’t often time to formulate a considered response, but there is an immediate engagement with the work.

You have featured yourself as the subject for some of your projects especially in your earlier work, how easy was it to edit something that you were the focus of?

It can be very difficult to be the subject of the work and try and edit the work. I used to find it very difficult. But over the years I’ve become better at creating distance and not seeing me, but just a body. I still feature in the work because I feel it’s important to have that experience and the knowledge that is gained from that experience. 

Why do you think it is so important for people to be aware of the culture around them and their history? Do you think that some people do not consider so important anymore?

History is essentially storytelling and I’m fascinated by narratives and characters and how these are shaped by the people who tell histories. If you want to understand the present you have to engage with the past. I think people are put off by history partly because of the way it’s articulated, particularly at school as dates and dry facts. When you focus on character and narratives they love it.

Some of your recent projects have explored the idea of Afro-futurism. What does this mean and why were you inspired to use it as focus of your work?

Afro-futurism was a term coined in the 1990s by the writer Mark Dery. It encompasses are range of writers, musicians, artists who have applied an Afrocentric approach to science fiction and models of the future and utopias. I’m interested in models of the future, partly because they provide an opportunity to think about the present. In trying to imagine the future we often mirror the concerns of the present.

A lot of your influence has come from sixties artists and their study of how art interacts with culture. What is it that you learnt from these figures and why do you think their strategies of working made such an impression on you?

I think some of the artists from the 60s and 70s I’ve looked at are often very playful and speculative. You can see them testing ideas in the context of the city, the gallery using them as their playgrounds. There is a danger of over romanticizing that period, but I do like its openness and willingness to question and challenge assumptions.

What kind of things do you plan to cover in your upcoming SPIEL talk at Norwich Arts Centre? 

I’ll be presenting a small selection of projects that I’m currently working on. Including the Covers series that sees me perform live versions of album covers. I’ll try and put this other work into a wider context of other artists’ practices and I’ll give the audience an insight to how they might snap like a diva!

Harold will be giving a talk at SPIEL at Norwich Arts Centre on 10th December. This event is Pay What You Can, seated, and starts at 20:00.

http://norwichartscentre.co.uk/events/spiel-harold-offeh-artist-talk/