praksis oslo r29: for real?

Developed with artist Harold Offeh, residency 29 For real? addresses ideas of authenticity and identity in art and society.

Contemporary media are permeated by misleading content that serves motives of financial and personal gain. Within this economy, authenticity – the quality of being real, genuine or true – carries a high premium. Influencers trade on their authenticity to sell their followers a model of what and how to be. Fake news spreads uncertainty and lies, and erodes trust. Politicians seesaw on policies in pursuit of public favour. By contrast, art supposedly exists outside of the need for truth or purpose – so what is the place of authenticity in the context or art today?

The practice of artist and PRAKSIS residency convenor Harold Offeh explores concepts and questions raised by the inhabiting and embodying of histories, including the notion of authenticity. In this residency, Offeh invites participants to probe the concept of authenticity. Questions include: What are the distinctions between the authentic and the fake? Where are their boundaries (if they exist)? Today, what does it mean to be authentic, in the domains of both art and society?

More information

For this residency, Harold Offeh is seeking to convene an internationally diverse group of practitioners, individuals or collective members who will bring a range of critical and practical approaches to concepts of authenticity. The residency will offer a space to share ideas and resources, engage in both individual and shared activities and test out concepts and plans.

The group will collectively plan a schedule at the residency’s outset. The schedule will include daily group meetings and joint activities such as readings, discussions, visits to relevant spaces in Oslo, networking events, communal meals and socialising, alongside unstructured time for independent reflection and research. In the first week, residents will participate in PRAKSIS’s customary “Meet the Residents” event, informally introducing themselves and their practices to the rest of the group and the Oslo arts community.

About Harold Offeh

Artist Harold Offeh works in various media, including performance, video, photography, social arts practice and pedagogy. His work explores the concepts and questions that are raised by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. Humour plays an important role in his playful yet biting performative excavations of identity within historical and contemporary cultural tropes. He has exhibited widely at venues in the UK and internationally, including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito, Japan.

Offeh studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton and MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art. In 2020 he completed a practice-based PhD at Leeds Beckett University, in which he explored the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and is currently Senior Tutor in Fine Art MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University and Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2019, he was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, the most substantial award of its kind in the UK.