Soft Zeros
Soft Zeros
Mimi Onuoha
Mimi Onuoha
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.
Ọnụọha uses the term ‘soft zero’ as a metaphor for power and invisibility within data systems, showing how emptiness itself is politically produced. Language tools such as ChatGPT generate knowledge from existing datasets, reproducing linguistic and canonical biases – favouring anglophone, Western, and institutional perspectives. Trained to be ‘helpful’, such systems stabilize rather than challenge the status quo.
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.
Soft Zeros premiered on November 29, 2025 at Secession.
Installation, Software, Technology, Visual Arts
2022
About Mimi Onuoha
Brooklyn, NY
Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. By foregrounding absence and removal, her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities’ different relationships to systems that are digital, cultural, historical, and ecological. Onuoha has been in residence at places like Studio XX in Canada, Data & Society Research Institute, the Royal College of Art in the UK, and Eyebeam Center for Arts & Technology. She has spoken and exhibited internationally at venues like La Gaitê Lyrique in France, FIBER Festival in the Netherlands, Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in China, and Le Centre Pompidou in France. Her work includes In Absentia, a series of prints that borrow language from research conducted by Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois in the 19th-century on black rural life, and A People’s Guide To AI, a comprehensive beginner’s guide to understanding AI and other data-driven systems. Onuoha lives and works in Brooklyn.
Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. By foregrounding absence and removal, her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities’ different relationships to systems that are digital, cultural, historical, and ecological. Onuoha has been in residence at places like Studio XX in Canada, Data & Society Research Institute, the Royal College of Art in the UK, and Eyebeam Center for Arts & Technology. She has spoken and exhibited internationally at venues like La Gaitê Lyrique in France, FIBER Festival in the Netherlands, Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in China, and Le Centre Pompidou in France. Her work includes In Absentia, a series of prints that borrow language from research conducted by Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois in the 19th-century on black rural life, and A People’s Guide To AI, a comprehensive beginner’s guide to understanding AI and other data-driven systems. Onuoha lives and works in Brooklyn.