Harold Offeh on fear, belonging and the power of imagination to reshape how we encounter one another.
31 August 2026
In ‘Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Aliens’, Harold Offeh brings together selected works from across 25 years of practice to examine the shifting figures of the stranger and the alien. Drawing on James Baldwin, Afrofuturism, performance, and participatory practice, the exhibition considers how social, political, and cultural systems construct otherness, while asking what might emerge when fear gives way to curiosity.
In conversation with ART AFRICA, Offeh reflects on humour as a tool of engagement, the ethics of participation, the changing role of his own body within his practice, and the importance of creating space for collective imagination. At the heart of the conversation is a question that runs throughout the exhibition: how might encounters with those we do not know become opportunities for trust, care and new ways of seeing?
Brendon Bell-Roberts: This exhibition features works from the past twenty-five years of your career. As you look back, what unexpected connections or conversations have you noticed between your earlier and more recent pieces?
Harold Offeh: The exhibition is not a full survey. There are selected works that we’ve taken to be in conversation with the billboard commission I’ve done with The Showroom. So I wouldn’t say it’s a comprehensive span of my past 25 years of work, but even so, within that, I think one of the key things we were thinking about with this exhibition was ongoing threads and inquiries, particularly related to ideas of the ‘alien’ or the ‘stranger’. I’ve been aware that in earlier works, I used them as a framework for thinking about processes of alienation and othering, as manifested in different cultural, social, and political spheres. But in my early performance videos like Alien at Large, 2001, this was primarily explored through me performing and placing myself in different public contexts, or sometimes just performing in more solitary studio contexts. I think what’s changed over the years is that some of those concerns have opened out a bit more, in terms of how I share them with collaborators. They opened out into a broader, site-specific and social context, which I think is less focused on my body and a series of performative actions centred around me, and is more located in gathering, collecting, and then sharing. So I think this show has facilitated an awareness of that shift, while also understanding that at heart are the same concerns, and I’m still trying to think through these cultural frameworks of the stranger and the alien.
In ‘Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Aliens’, you explore both the stranger and the alien. How do these two figures differ for you, and what new ideas or possibilities do they bring to your work?
In thinking about both the stranger and the alien, there are clear differences in how those terms sit culturally. If I think about the alien, I’m often interested in how that word exists in different parallel spheres: in the public realm as a legal term, ‘illegal alien ’, or in popular culture, the idea through sci-fi of extraterrestrials. I’m interested in how the language is mutable. So, we might have generosity for sci-fi aliens, like ET, etc. But currently, there’s a very harsh rhetoric around so-called ‘illegal aliens’ entering from different countries. And then the stranger, I think, exists in a different framework; the conversation around strangers is often predicated on fear. But unlike the alien, the stranger can be domestic. A stranger can also be your neighbour; there is a difference in proximity. There’s a sense in which the stranger represents a threat or danger – stranger danger. I’m old enough to remember being told in primary school, ” Don’t talk to strangers. There is an architecture of fear that’s built up. So I’ve been conscious of those frameworks. Through some of the processes in my work, I’m trying to weave and play with some of these ideas of knowing and not knowing. In works in the exhibition like Stranger in the Village, 2019, which references James Baldwin, there is an ongoing attempt to bring people in, bring audiences into a sense of dialogue with these terms and the different registers that stranger and alien exist within.
James Baldwin’s Stranger in the Village is a key inspiration for this exhibition. How has your relationship with Baldwin’s work changed while creating this show, and which of his questions still feel relevant to you today?
In relation to Baldwin specifically, The Stranger in the Village text (1953) has a direct influence on the show, and particularly the installation named after Baldwin’s text that I made in Japan during a residency in 2019. Your question asks how my relationship with Baldwin has changed with this show. I don’t know if it’s massively changed. In coming back to the text, I’ve been thinking about some of the propositions and underpinnings that Baldwin puts forward about our sense of positionality, like how the context that we’re in shapes our experience and how we are perceived. It sounds obvious, but Baldwin explores the complex dynamics and processes of alienation and othering. So it’s a useful tool to think through Baldwin’s framing of the Stranger, and it’s something I often return to.
Humour is a big part of your work, even when you deal with difficult histories of violence, exclusion, and power. What can humour reveal or make possible that more serious approaches might not?
Yes, humour is a big part of the work. I always feel slightly reticent about saying that because it sets up an idea that the work is funny and you have to appreciate it based on its comedy chops, which is not what I’m attempting to do. I’m more interested in humour as a mechanism for engaging audiences. Also, I sometimes use the complexity of humour, where it can sit within tragedy, trauma, or emotional distress. And when I’m talking about humour, I’m thinking about absurdity or particularly things that are extraordinary, referencing things like campness. It’s an opportunity to bring people into proximity to things. As a young artist, I really wanted to make work that was consciously in dialogue with people, but also spoke to the things I was interested in within popular and contemporary culture.
People often see participation as a way to include others, but it can also bring out uncertainty, vulnerability, or difference. How do you approach the ethics of involving audiences and collaborators, and what have you learned from these experiences?
Regarding the ethics of participation in art, I’m aware that this is complex and can be contested. I often think about how the terms of engagement are important, particularly in framing participatory practices and allowing participants agency. I think about how they engage with the project. It’s important to be transparent about the context in which you’re working, the parameters, and the possible outcomes; all of those things are important. You have to build support structures, and that process sometimes means people must sit with that uneasiness, uncertainty and vulnerability. It can be difficult or problematic to impose structures, but there can be scaffolding that supports people and the project. It’s important that people have agency, that they have the right to refuse or withdraw or to withhold, as much as they might actively give or consent and produce. The dynamics of participatory projects are really central; it’s actually the work. In different contexts, this work can become invisible because of the rush towards some glittering outcome. You don’t have to define the quality of participation by its outcomes. But the process or methodology that’s been developed can be really amazing, very layered, generative, and generous.
In your work, performance is a way to live within histories rather than just show them. What does this kind of embodiment let you explore that other art forms do not?
Comparing performance to other mediums, the obvious difference is liveness. There’s an immediacy with live performance because it’s less mediated than other forms of art-making. That mediation can take the form of materials — whether ceramic, wood, paint, bronze, or even technologies — but performance can exist without this too. I enjoy the possibilities opened up by performance. It provides me with a series of resources and strategies that can be employed in relation to situations and contexts. This is especially useful when working in a historical context where you might want to activate and bring historical context in proximity to the present.
This exhibition encourages people to imagine better futures while still facing the present. How do you balance imagination and critique in your work, and how do they support each other?
I totally agree with the question there about encouraging people to imagine better futures. I think building people’s capacity for investment in the future — prioritising the future over the present — is a key political action we need to foster. The question is also interesting in forcing me to think about how you balance imagination and critique in the work, and I think both are connected. Imagination is that space of curiosity, and fuelling curiosity is super important today. I think there is an urgency around building capacity to imagine alternative futures. That process of imagining is also inherently critical in that the process of speculating on possible futures brings up questions.
As people experience ‘Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Aliens’, what questions or changes in perspective do you hope they take with them, especially when they meet strangers in their daily lives?
I don’t know if I ever really think about a specific thing that I want people to get from the work. I don’t really feel it’s my place to legislate; I think that somehow potentially closes things down. I mean, you know, there are obviously concerns that I have and interests that I have. What’s at stake is how the work meets people’s curiosity and what questions people apply, ask, or speculate upon during that encounter. Specifically in regard to what the work might encourage people to do in relation to meeting strangers in our daily lives, I think it’s about opening ourselves up to a possibility. Particularly in a public sphere framed around fear and a culture of threat. Generally, meeting strangers is pleasant; people might sometimes be grumpy, shy or wary, but the vast majority of public interactions I have are friendly. I think that’s often our lived experience, unless one is in an area with a high level of antisocial behaviour.
The exhibition at The Showroom was developed to accompany a billboard commission I created with The Showroom as part of the public art programme at Paddington Square. Working with a brilliant group of young people from the gallery’s Imagining Futures programme, we designed a text-based artwork as a billboard. That artwork, called Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Walks, emerged from conversations with the young people about the experiences in public spaces and the desire to shift the terms of public safety conversations away from victim-blaming. The artwork and its title are a call, a prompt for collective care and responsibility. As strangers, we are all responsible for our collective safety through mutual care and respect. Across both the exhibition and the billboard, I think this is a common message and offering to audiences.
This exhibition was on view at The Showroom, London from 26 June 2026 until 15 August 2026.
