The Showroom is proud to present Harold Offeh’s exhibition Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Aliens celebrating one of the UK’s leading socially engaged performance artists. Guided by curiosity, wit and humour, the artist confronts dominant histories and present-day cultural norms, positioning imagination as a powerful tool in the creation of more hopeful futures.

The exhibition brings together a selection of works from Offeh’s 25-year practice, focusing specifically on his interest in the ‘stranger in the village’ construct. Referencing African-American novelist James Baldwin’s 1953 essay Stranger in the Village which documented Baldwin’s experience as an outsider in Switzerland, Offeh seeks to position the ‘stranger’ or ‘alien’ as a lens through which to propose, question and observe from new and foreign perspectives. The motif and symbolism of the alien runs through a number of Offeh’s works, from Alien Communications and Alien at Large to his Mothership Collective project, which references Sun Ra and Afrofuturism as models of Black agency, joy and transformation. Along with these themes, the exhibition explores a rich array of subjects populating his diverse body of work, including the posing Black body, the performative gesture, and collaboration and labour as practice.

Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Aliens offers a space that invites encounter and trust, positioning audience members as active participants in the artist’s ongoing critique of social systems and stereotypes.

The exhibition stands in dialogue with Offeh’s upcoming Paddington Square x The Showroom billboard commission, which will be unveiled on 23 July during the exhibition’s run. Working with a group of young people from The Showroom’s Imagining Futures programme, the billboard – titled Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Walks – explores the young people’s hopeful desire to increase empathy and mutual trust between anonymous passers-by as they encounter each other in London’s public spaces.

Together the two presentations look back and look forward, positioning imagination as a powerful tool for creating more hopeful futures.

About Harold Offeh
Harold Offeh (b. 1977, Ghana) lives and works in Cambridge and London. Working across performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice, Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture, grappling with issues such as colonialism, the dynamics of work, labour and gender, and ideals of masculine power.

Offeh has exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, Kettle’s Yard, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, and Art Tower Mito. His major survey, Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet, was recently exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Offeh is currently the Head of Programme in MA Contemporary Art Practice and a visiting lecturer in MA Print at the Royal College of Art, London.