Sonic Performance by Artist Africanus Okokon

Please join us on Tuesday, July 15, from 6-7:30pm for an experimental electronic and sonic experience with spoken word presented by artist Africanus Okokon, and a poetry reading to introduce the performance by artist Alexandria Couch.

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition THIS IS NOT A RETREAT! NXTHVN Through the Years. Although the gallery is temporarily closed, the exhibition can be experienced online through Bloomberg Connects. Keep up to date about our operating hours by following us on social media @fordfoundationgallery

About the Artists

Africanus Okokon works with moving image, sound, performance, installation, painting, assemblage and collage to explore the dialectics of forgetting and memory in relation to mediated cultural and shared and personal histories. He is interested in questions around language, translation, cultural transformation, decay and death as they relate to recorded media.

He has had solo exhibitions and presentations at Von Ammon Co and Helena Anrather Gallery. Group exhibitions, and performances include Lyles and King, Sean Kelly Gallery, Perrotin Gallery, Helena Anrather Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Contemporary Arts Center Gallery at UC Irvine, the International Print Center in New York, Mass MoCA and The Kitchen. Africanus has screened films at various festivals including the BlackStar Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Film Festival, the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation and the Chale Wote Street Art Festival. 

His work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, The Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), New American Paintings, PopMatters, Electronic Sound Magazine and The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music. 

Africanus was awarded the NXTHVN Fellowship in 2021–22. He is an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Alexandria Couch is a visual artist whose work explores the intersection between dissociative dreamscapes and an expansive personal archive both historic and mythical. Textiles, recycled materials, text, paint, and furniture are used to hold, mend, disrupt, and document a vast interior world in which contradictions are inevitable. Using shapeshifting as a mode of operation, Couch interrogates the space between the dimensions of her reality and indeterminate universes.

Couch is a native of Akron, Ohio, where she received her BFA in Printmaking and Painting at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art (2020). She received a Printmaking and Painting MFA at Yale University (2023). Couch has shown in multiple exhibitions including the 2019 and 2020 AXA Art Prize, the Ross-Sutton Gallery’s Presentation for 1-54 Art Fair in New York, Heaven at New Image Art, Comfort/(Dis)Comfort at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the 2022 Front Triennial, and A Signal Urgent But Breaking at Perrotin in New York.