The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is proud to present the first museum show in Argentina of Onome Ekeh, an artist born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, started out as a painter, transitioned to design, fell in love with film and, somewhere in the collusion, went digital and picked up an AI habit along the way. Her work encompasses film, video, theatre, literature and radio. This exhibition presents the artist’s most recent films and images from the series African Jetset (2022), Afropunk, Lagos, 1982 (2022) and Glittering Witness (2024).

Speculative in structure, these works alter the passing of time, re-imagining the past and projecting possible futures of African design. A case in point is African Jetset, a series created in response to the violence and trauma that has marked the bulk of African migrations, from slavery to economic or conflict-driven displacement. In Ekeh’s words, ‘I wanted to create a corrective space, an alternative timeline where there was never any interruption: no slave trade, no colonialisation, no external war or plunder. Instead, the continent developed along internally prosperous lines, with Africans allowed to luxuriate in the bounty of the natural resources of their homelands.’ In a shamanic twist, this retrospection is the future.

In her film The Curiously Dressed Gentleman, presented during the 2024 art fair in Basel, Switzerland, the artist perpetrates the fictional hijack of the Swiss financial system as a means of subverting the ongoing homogenisation of the Western imaginary. Through extraordinary visuals, Ekeh’s surreal montage enacts the collapse of a mysterious icon of human perfection devoured by the souls of the jungle. 

The Society of the Birds takes a more autobiographical turn. An exercise in speculative genealogy, the artist unbridles her anarchic drive and draws upon the infinite possibilities of artificial intelligence to spin a fabulous tale of bird societies. It relays the imagined saga of her ancestors as resistance enveloped in a riddle that subverts colonial and military subjugation.

Curated by: Victoria Noorthoorn
Exhibition Design: Iván Rösler
Production: Edgar Lacombe