In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha (2022 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.

Some statisticians use the term ‘soft zero’ to describe values that appear as nothing – registered as absence or inactivity – without confirmation of true non-existence. A dataset showing no entries for a certain demographic group does not prove that the group is absent; it only reveals that it was not recorded. Ọnụọha uses this as a metaphor for power and invisibility within data systems, showing how emptiness itself is politically produced. In addition, language tools such as ChatGPT generate knowledge from existing datasets, reproducing linguistic and canonical biases – favouring anglophone, Western, and institutional perspectives while marginalising informal, queer, decolonial, and speculative ones. Trained to be ‘helpful’, such systems stabilise rather than challenge the status quo.

Ọnụọha, by contrast, seeks to create new forms of data that 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.