Africanus Okokon

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, shared, and personal histories. He is interested in questions around language, translation, cultural transformation, decay, and death as they relate to recorded media.

Okokon received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020, where he won the Alice Kimball Travelling Fellowship. He was awarded the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship in 2021–22. An award-winning filmmaker, he has screened films at festivals including the BlackStar Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Film Festival, Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, New England Animation Film Festival at the ICA Boston, and Chale Wote Street Art Festival at the National Theatre of Ghana, among others.

Recent solo exhibitions and presentations include Von Ammon Co (2024) and Helena Anrather Gallery (2022). He has participated in group exhibitions at Sean Kelly Gallery (NYC), Perrotin Gallery (NYC), Lyles & King, Hesse Flatow EAST, Microscope Gallery, the International Print Center New York, and UC Irvine Contemporary Arts Center Gallery. He has performed at MASS MoCA, The Ford Foundation Gallery, and The Kitchen. His work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, The Washington Post, NPR, New American Paintings, DJ Mag, PopMatters, Electronic Sound Magazine, and The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music. Okokon is represented by Von Ammon Co in Washington, DC.