Angela Anh Nguyen & Okey Ofomata: Flight Logs

Harlesden High Street is excited to announce an upcoming duo show by LA-based artists Angela Anh Nguyen and Okey Ofomata. This collection of paintings and textiles looks to capture the present moment with objects from the recent past—people, art, and products condemned by the mainstream as ‘problematic.’ Flight Logs satirizes popular culture whilst highlighting the feelings of disorientation and anxiety it engenders in people. It confronts us with the possibility that the ‘democratization’ of culture and media conceals the persistence of foundational inequalities of power.

Enacting a ‘return of the repressed,’ Nguyen and Ofomata depict the detritus of a culture intent on erasing itself. The various artifacts depicted here constitute an archive of failure, a collection of cultural products suppressed in an attempt to localize the violence and alienation that pervades every facet of modern life. Each ‘cancellation’ is an act of forgetting; it seeks to censor an individual and remove them from the public sphere, while also obscuring their status as a symptom of deeper problems. It’s a social practice that reflects our continued preoccupation with celebrity, pursuing the exceptional at the expense of the mundane. Yet it is in the domain of the latter where the multifarious miseries of this world are reproduced. By re-contextualizing familiar cultural objects, these pieces illustrate the banality of the problematic.

The interminable culture war(s) that now dominates contemporary discourse is premised on the possibility of saving or reviving some aspect of prevailing norms, therefore obstructing the emergence of new value-systems. The negation of its own products is thus an act of self-preservation for the culture industry, as critique comes to prioritize the ephemeral over the structural. How might this process be turned against itself? Can those ‘cancelled’ figures and trends, pushed to the margins of collective memory, be used to trace the contours of the present? As Nguyen and Ofomata show through their art, one can learn a lot about someone by looking through their trash—and the same holds for that which popular culture attempts to discard.

Presenting multitudes yet recognisable states of anxiety, paranoia and overconsumption, both artists utilise their material with a sense of action, depicting characters going through relatable struggles surrounded by familiar ‘iconic’ and ‘cancelled’ material possessions, making a statement about the dividers present in the political economy of the West.