Who decides what is remembered – and what disappears? Can data sets and algorithms fill the gaps left by our memory, or do they just reproduce it? In the Vienna Secession, the US-American-Nigerian artist Mimi Ọnụọha digs into the depths of human and structural forgetting in the exhibition “Soft Zeros”. And in doing so, it highlights the blind spots of the systems to which we increasingly entrust the management of history.
Ọnụọha’s art is tragic and comical at the same time, accessible and precise, and it refuses to be morally clear. Despite the difficult subjects, Ọnụọha does not rely on concern or accusation, but rather on quiet, persistent thinking. “Soft Zeros” is an exhibition that unsettles in a positive sense.
The focus is the 15-minute video work “Ground Truths” (2025). Ọnụọha, born in 1989, talks about the so-called Convict Leasingone that has barely been processed Chapters of American history: Black people, criminalized and imprisoned, were systematically exploited as forced laborers until the 1920s.
In the Texas town of Sugar Land, near Ọnụọha’s birthplace, construction work uncovered a mass grave containing the remains of 95 people who had literally been worked to death. How could this form of violence disappear so completely from American public memory?
A mass grave containing 95 people was discovered in Texas. How could this form of violence disappear so completely from public memory?
In the film, Ọnụọha herself becomes the protagonist who goes on a search for truth. In order to detect possible other such graves in Texas, she is also training a machine learning model. She speaks openly about her lack of knowledge, about the laborious research, about incomplete data sets, algorithmic dead ends and the predominantly defensive and negative reactions to her questions.
Your film is without pathos, without dramatic images, but with subtle self-irony. His narrative unfolds in several chapters; Shots of the artist roaming the forest with a spade alternate with work-in-progress scenes about the development of data sets.
The room where the video is played is lined with artificial turf. In the middle of it rises a human-sized hill. He translates the film’s abstract questions into a physically tangible metaphor: memory as something that lies beneath the surface, is overgrown and leveled – and is powerfully present.
This first room in the exhibition already makes Ọnụọha’s strength clear: her ability to transform complex connections into clear, sensual images. Brightly colored barrier tapes mark permeable boundaries. They contain sentences that Ọnụọha heard during her research on “Ground Truths”: “How could I have known,” or “But I wasn’t there.”
Did something not happen just because there is no data?
Behind them are photographs. They suggest death without showing it – images of hands in the earth, some placed on the ground. Film, hills and photos together dismantle the false hope that algorithmic systems can correct human forgetting. Instead, they turn out to be a reflection of a memory that is trained to suppress.
Mimi Number: “Soft Zeros”. Secession Vienna, until February 22nd
The title “Soft Zeros” provides the conceptual bracket for this. In statistics it refers to values that appear as absences without any assurance that what is referred to actually does not exist. Has something not happened just because there is no data about it? Ọnụọha focuses her gaze on these empty spaces – uncomfortable and without false reconciliation. It negotiates history as well as the mechanisms of data transfer and technological authority.
Your form of infotainment – somewhere between an essay and a story – is of that rare quality that one would wish to see more often. Above all, “Soft Zeros” leaves us with a question: How can we remember when algorithms increasingly decide what counts as rememberable?