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.