Africanus Okokon

“This is how you disappear.” — Scott Walker

Africanus Okokon works with the moving image, performance, painting, assemblage, collage, sound, and installation to explore the dialectics of forgetting and remembrance in relation to cultural, shared, and personal mediated histories. This installation presents Unpossessed, a reactive video work that draws from scenes of disappearance in Nollywood films, and a cast resin sculpture presiding over the room.

He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2013 and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2020, where he was a recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship.

Africanus has performed, screened, and shown work in international venues including the Ottawa Animation Film Festival, the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, the BlackStar Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, Sean Kelly Gallery, the International Print Center in New York, Perrotin Gallery, Pioneer Works, and The Kitchen. Africanus was a 2021–2022 Studio Fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut and a 2020 Artist-in-Resident at Artspace New Haven. His work has been featured in publications such as The Yale Review, New American Paintings, PopMatters, and the Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music.

He is currently an Assistant Professor in Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is based in New Haven, Connecticut.