Ofong Ufok

Mme Anam Utom

Ofong Ufok

2019-2022

Installation: Large hand-woven textiles, Second-hand clothes, repurposed textile, rope, Dye

Dimension variable 

Mme Anam Utom

2022

Used Coats, Epoximate Resin

Dimension Variable

How Can I Be Nobody is a site-specific solo exhibition combining elements from Udondian’s recent collaborative projects that include woven textiles, sculptures, and sound, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York City. Continuing her recent exploration into the links between bodies and transit within global labor economies, the installation connects Smack Mellon’s Dumbo gallery, a former industrial site, to the foundational role of immigrant labor in capitalist production.

Ofong Ufok

Through a developed relationships with various local immigrant communities, including a partnership with Stitch Buffalo, a textile center near the artist’s studio that facilitates refugee and immigrant women in creating handcrafted goods to find economic empowerment. She has collaborated with and compensated community members, weaving with them and creating sculptural casts of their hands while collecting their stories.

Mme Anam Utom

Through an exchange process, my collaborators were asked to donate their used work clothes preferably in black in exchange for new ones. These collected clothing have been frozen into forms that reference the bodies of their owners in fallen shapes. Installed on the floor, the forms allude to the repressive, exploitative conditions faced by workers within labor systems and other neocolonial conditioning.