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?
In “Soft Zeros,” Mimi Ọnụọha (2022 Creative Capital Awardee) 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.
Ọnụọha seeks to render the systematically excluded visible. The docu-fiction film “Ground Truths” (2025), which forms the heart of the exhibition, follows the artist’s attempt to train a machine-learning model to locate potential mass graves across Texas. What begins as a technical experiment unfolds into a reflection on the limits of collective memory – on what we document, what we recall, and what we allow to disappear.
Creative Capital Project Premiere: Soft Zeros
🗓️ Through Feb 22, 2026
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@ViennaSecession , Austria
🔗 in bio
1. Mimi Ọnụọha, “No One Told Me,” 2025, Soft Zeros, Secession, installation view, custom-printed barrier tape. Photo: Sophie Pölzl.
2. Mimi Ọnụọha, “Ground Truth,”, 2025, film still.
3. Mimi Ọnụọha, “Ground Truth,” Soft Zeros, 2025, Secession, installation view. Photo: Sophie Pölzl.
4. Mimi Ọnụọha, “Ground Truth,” Soft Zeros, 2025, Secession, installation view. Photo: Sophie Pölzl.
5. Mimi Ọnụọha, “We Don’t Talk About That,” Soft Zeros, 2025, artificial turf, green paint, wood framing, fabric. Photo: Sophie Pölzl.
