ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Mimi Ọnụọha Performance Lecture

May 30, 2023·48 min·4 clips

Mimi Onuoha discovers that some truths are 'unknowable' because they threaten the very systems that hold power.

Absence is where the lecture starts. Mimi begins with places, charts, and objects that cannot quite hold what they claim to show. Missing data, in her telling, is never just a blank. The Library of Missing Things gives those blanks a body, a place to sit and be noticed. She moves through specific gaps: people killed by police in the U.S., people living off-lease in New York, Roma population counts, and cash held beyond U.S. borders. Each case has its own texture, but the pattern is hard to miss. Someone, somewhere, decides what counts. From there, the lecture stretches into food. Mimi reads Earl Butz's language under Presidents Nixon and Ford as more than policy talk. It sounds like scale, pressure, and profit. Food as weapon, bigger farms, and fence-row planting all point to a government imagination trained on scarcity and competition. She pays close attention to wording, especially in a food-production quote where removing the implied collective changes the moral weather of the sentence. Feeding everyone is not the same as making everyone responsible. The politics stay physical. Postwar agricultural technology, the Green Revolution, and U.S. policy come through as systems built around fear, control, and optimization. The room never disappears, either. By the end, Mimi is back with the act of making, recalling a one-day shoot with a crew and calling it beautiful. Then the lecture loosens into the live event around it: thanks, corrections, people moving, and instructions about the gallery.

As heard by us

A lecture on missing data that turns absence into a political and artistic form.

Mimi Ọnụọha's lecture treats absence as a method, using the Library of Missing Things to show how gaps in charts, counts, and records can expose political blind spots.

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Why you'd press play

You want an art lecture about missing data that widens into policy.

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