Sabo Kpade speaks with the artist about ’90s trip-hop lyrics, play as a mode of learning, and success on his own terms.
While gallery directors and Arts Council representatives delivered formal speeches at the opening of Harold Offeh’s twenty-five-year survey at Kettle’s Yard, the artist’s voice hummed softly from a speaker nearby. That looped “Mmm,” easy to miss amid opening-night chatter, might be the most important work in the show. Ambiguous yet affirmative, almost dismissive, it gently annotates the institutional seriousness, refusing to let celebration become too earnest. It’s vintage Offeh: play as political method, humour as critical conduit. Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could be Sweet takes its title from a Portishead lyric and brings together documented performance, re-imagined album covers, durational works and much besides, spanning two decades. Head of Programme in MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, Offeh’s exhibition reflects on rediscovery, re-presentation, and his long-standing commitment to “serious play.”
Sabo Kpade: The exhibition title comes from Portishead. How did that ’90s trip-hop lyric become the framework for looking back at twenty-five years of work?
Harold Offeh: Bringing the show together forced me to really think about this time when I wasn’t an artist, all the time I was thinking about how I might be an artist. And so in the ‘90s, being on an art foundation course, I remember this song, It Could Be Sweet, very much. It sort of seemed to sum up the possibility of being an artist — the desire for that. And then breaking it down to the lyrics, those three lines, I felt they became a good way of thinking through the show and ways that I’ve worked. “Mmm” is sonic, and it’s sort of linguistic, but it’s not a fully formed word. It’s ambiguous. “Gotta try a little harder” reflected a lot of early work, this iterative, repetitious desire. “It could be sweet” sums up the ways in which I’ve been working over perhaps the last ten years or so, which is collaboratively, thinking about alternative futures.
SK: You’ve described play as “really serious.” How do you maintain it as a disciplined political practice rather than something dismissed as childish?
HO: Play is really serious, and we need to take it more seriously, particularly adults. Play is a form of learning, and out of that, unintentionally, it stimulates curiosity and leads you to question and challenge things critically. There are lots of forces that don’t want us to play. You know, they want us to work. It’s a very crucial, political thing. The key thing for me is how you find allies, how you navigate, how you make strategies to navigate these things. I’ve just reconciled myself. I want to work with the people who are on my wavelength, who are sympathetic to my values.
SK: Your 2001 work, Smile, has taken on new resonance. How has your understanding of its politics evolved?
HO: It’s interesting how the weight and resonance of that work have shifted over time. When I made it, it was very much about a naive thing about thinking about durations and gestures. I was interested in doing performances where I do what the song is telling me to do. But over time, I have much more of a sense of the politics of performance, politics of performative Blackness, and the labour of that. In the thirty-five-minute version, that’s where you really see over time the shaking and the labour. I literally perform the labour there.
SK: Your workshop practice isn’t supplementary — it’s central. How do you design those encounters so they remain genuinely open yet rigorous?
HO: Workshops are a fundamental part of my process. Workshops are the site of encounter, dialogue, discovery and collaboration. I’m hoping these might be useful to people wanting to plan and develop their own workshops. The workshop is this space of exchange and conversation that I love so much. What I’ve learned from most is about the art of trying to speak to people and to meet people where they are.
SK: How do we get past hierarchy, elitism, and institutional politics in these engagements?
HO: For me, the artist just gets in the way, really, because there’s so much bullshit around them — so much hierarchy, elitism, class and colonial politics. But there’s also so much good stuff. How do we get past that bollocks? How do we get to the stuff — culture, how we think, how we feel, our histories, our futures — that we’re actually concerned with? That’s what I’m trying to get to.
SK: Ultimately, how do you define success on your terms and the role of play in that?
HO: I discovered my practice is antithetical to the art market. That’s not really what drives or motivates my practice. Once I reconciled it, I was like, “Okay, these are the things I want to be working with.” It’s actually liberating. I often ask my students, “What does success look like on your terms?” If that’s not what you want, then that’s fine, and that understanding is liberating. I’m more interested in this kind of pedagogical work: creating more capacity for curiosity and play.
