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Secession PodcastAuthor: Vienna Secession
Secession Podcast is a digital series created by the Secession in 2022. In conversations with artists, curators, and theorists, the podcast series offers interesting insights into the Secessions exhibition programme of twelve to fifteen contemporary art shows every year. The program also features discussions on current issues, as well as experimental sound formats and creating an oral history archive conversations between members of the Association of Visual Artists, who share their personal recollections and reflect on the 125-year history of this unique artist-run institution. Language: en Genres: Arts, Visual Arts Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Artists: Mimi Ọnụọha in conversation with Jeanette Pacher
Episode 75
Thursday, 18 December, 2025
What can we truly know about ourselves and our histories in an age of hypervisibility, when algorithms and social structures alike decide not only what is seen but what is pushed into invisibility or irrelevance? On the afternoon of 28 November 2025, Mimi Ọnụọha talked about her exhibition Soft Zeros; what she learned about collecting data and organizing it, about the Convict Leasing system and the impact is has had especially on Black lives in the USA, and about collective forgetting and denial over a 2-year research stretch and in the process of creating the new body of work that is presented in the exhibition. Mimi Ọnụọha Soft Zeros 29.11.2025 – 22.2.2026 In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha examines the unreliability of archives and the instability of knowledge, exploring how absence and silence – shaped by algorithmic bias, historical denial, and collective forgetting – become meaningful. She points to what has not been collected, asked, allowed, or represented. More Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha’s work questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the seeming absences that define systems of labor, ecology and relations. Ọnụọha’s work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (NY, USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (CN), La Gaitê Lyrique (FR), Gropius Bau (DE), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and Atlanta Contemporary (GA, USA), among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by the Academy of Arts, Berlin (DE), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (NY, USA), and Princeton University (NJ, USA). Her work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). Ọnụọha is a Creative Capital and Fulbright–National Geographic grantee. She is also the co-founder of A People’s Guide to Tech, an artist-led organization that makes educational guides and workshops about emerging technology. Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Vienna Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and since 2023, a jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna. Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession. The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Programmed by the board of the Secession. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Audio Editor: Paul Macheck Executive Producer: Jeanette Pacher
