Mimi Ọnụọha 40% Of Food In The Us Is Wasted (How The Hell Is That Progress, Man?)
Jan 25, 2024 - May 19, 2024
Ticket: Free
Mimi Ọnụọha’s 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) is an interactive video composed of archival video clips from the 1950s–1980s, drawn from the Prelinger Archives and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Advertising the technological optimism of big agriculture, the sampled footage and audio betray the myth of agricultural systems geared towards ever-increasing production and yield rather than equitable distribution. Retrospectively, the videos function as a reality check to the solutions they once proclaimed. The artwork’s title emphasizes the reality of food waste, referencing the USDA’s own damning estimate that 30–40% of food in the US is wasted. The presentation of the video clips in a repetitive grid formation advanced by continuous clicking amplifies the redundancies built into the process of automation. Jules Faife’s accompanying music drives the narrative and pulls the viewer into it, but Ọnụọha also works against the score and archival audio, breaking up their momentum by inserting the question “How the Hell is That Progress, Man?” Documenting the demographics of the people working in the fields, at the conveyor belts, and in roles of oversight, the footage openly displays systemic conditions of production and labor. 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) continues Ọnụọha’s practice of interrogating and exposing the internal logics of technology-driven progress.

About Black Code Black Code highlights Black contemporary artists making use of emergent technologies in their practice. The three artists on view complicate the assumed neutrality of digital technologies, reimagining machines into frameworks that function to assert and extend black subjectivity. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the 2017 special issue of The Black Scholar where cultural theorists, Mark Anthony Neal and Jessica Marie Johnson describe Black Code Studies as queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as a praxis and methodology that refuses the notion that black people are not engaged with technology, modernity, or the future. In offering an exploration of Black creative engagement with technology, this exhibition demonstrates the potentiality of new media to construct an expansive vision of Blackness; one that resists the rigidity of hegemonic representations, and instead, leans into the formal capacity of abstraction, multiplicity and rupture to visualize Black contemporary life.
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atlantacontemporary.org
Atlanta Contemporary
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