Covers
Exhibitions (M), Performances (I)
Performance, Identity, Embodiment
Covers is an internationally recognised performance project by artist Harold Offeh. Initiated in 2008, the project has evolved through major commissions from The Studio Museum, Harlem USA in 2014 and the Live Art Development Agency, London in 2015. Covers uses the artist’s body, durational actions and physical re-enactment to build on established performance methodologies of the 1970s by artists such as Adrian Piper and Marina Abramovic. Through photography, video and live performance — Offeh re-enacts archival album sleeve photographs by black singers from the 1970s and 80s, creating static, durational, tableaux poses. Covers, innovates through its use of performance strategies to re-activate historical popular cultural images. In collapsing live and documented elements Offeh makes visible the mediation and power of the photographic image to fix and shape identity.
In 2017 a new video installation series was developed for the touring group exhibition, Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK. One of the videos was also included in the exhibition, Tous, des sangs-mêlés (All mixed-bloods) at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France. Featuring over 60 international artists, the exhibition and accompanying publication investigates the inherent issues of what cultural identity means.
13th January 2017. Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK / 21 April 2017. Tous, des sangs-mêlés (All mixed-bloods) at MAC VAL, France
Performance, Re-enactment, Identity, Archive, Photography
The most moving and touching is undoubtedly the video of Harold Offeh: in his bathroom, in balance and naked, the artist tries to mimic the pose of Grace Jones on the cover of the album Island Life. Deconstructing the cliché of the black sculptural woman with the oiled body, it also explodes the partitioning of the genres. Another way to mix. (Translation from French original text.)
Harold Offeh beams himself down for the camera as a long-limbed and lithe disconaut Grace Jones.
Covers Playlist, Video Installation, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2017
Covers Playlist, Video Installation, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2017
Covers Live, Performance at Queers Traces, MAC, Birmingham, 2015
Covers Live, Performance at Queers Traces, MAC, Birmingham, 2015
Covers Live, Performance at Queers Traces, MAC, Birmingham, 2015
Covers Live, Performance at Queers Traces, MAC, Birmingham, 2015
Covers Live, P! Gallery, New York, 2016
Covers Live, P! Gallery, New York, 2016
Covers Live, P! Gallery, New York, 2016
Funded by Arts Council England, Le Department Val de Marne, France, Foyle Foundation, Nottingham City Council, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Leeds Beckett University.