by Alison Hugill // Jan. 30, 2026
Many years ago, I attended an academic lecture about Critical Race Theory in Germany. One of the speakers made a compelling point: most of the terminology from the field is borrowed from English. The word race (rasse in German), for example, often remains untranslated, as the German word is considered taboo because of its common usage to refer to animal breeds and its historical adoption by the Nazis. They noted that this has an interesting effect: racism and its contemporary understanding are widely framed as an American problem, something which, here, has already been eradicated and relegated to the past (Nazism). The distantiation caused by using a foreign language to describe many aspects of this widespread issue means that a certain amount of exemption of oneself can take place.
Similarly, as ICE is committing its violent raids across the US and resistance is becoming more prevalent, many commentators on social media are making comparisons to the Nazi’s tactics of mass abduction and deportation. It’s comforting, it seems, to position these histories as existing elsewhere, rather than facing their legacies and continuity at home. ICE has its roots in US American slave patrols and indigenous residential schools. This kind of terror is also homegrown.
Mimi Ọnụọha: ‘Soft Zeros,’ 2025-26, installation view at Secession // Photo by Sophie Pölzl
In her show ‘Soft Zeros’ at Secession in Vienna, Mimi Ọnụọha refuses to let us remain exonerated from any histories of racist violence. Descending into the historic museum’s basement exhibition space, we first encounter a series of scaffolding remnants plastered with caution tape. But rather than the usual warnings, the tape here cautions us about the self-explanations we might be tempted to use going forward: “But I wasn’t there” / “How could I have known” / “It’s not my history” / “No one told me” / “Get over it” / “Let it go already.” If one knew little about Ọnụọha’s practice, one could simply read this as a direct interpellation of Austrians and their role in National Socialism, and how a younger generation might grapple with it. But as we go further into the show, it becomes clear that the insidiousness of systemic racism does not easily follow national borders.
In a small room off the corridor, the point is made with a (perhaps too) heavy hand. A large mound covered in astroturf, titled ‘we don’t talk about that’ (2025), materially metaphorizes the invisibility of inconvenient truths—our attempts to hide, bury and cover over those narratives that do not tidily fit our self-perception, whether individual or communal. The astroturf reminds me of an American football field, evoking a sense of local or national pride that invites people into a kind of performative unity, so long as they don’t dig too deep.
Mimi Ọnụọha: ‘Soft Zeros,’ 2025-26, installation view at Secession // Photo by Sophie Pölzl
The pièce de résistance in the show, Ọnụọha’s new film ‘Ground Truths’ (2025) is, rather, all about digging deep—literally and figuratively. Scenes of the artist conducting research—making phone calls, combing archives, training models—are mixed with impressions of her walking through a dense forest-scape with a shovel and backpack, digging and eventually burying the fruits of her research.
The film and the exhibition as a whole were conceived around the audible silence that followed the discovery, in 2018, of the remains of 95 Black individuals in Sugar Land, Texas, near Ọnụọha’s childhood home. The people had all been part of a convict leasing system, a form of re-enslavement that emerged after the formal abolition of slavery. Through this system, they were arrested, often on false pretenses, and leased to private companies as cheap labor. This discovery prompted Ọnụọha to investigate the probability that there would be other, similar mass graves in the area and across the South. She decided to train a machine learning model to discover more, through seven steps that she lays out clearly in the film, including diligently learning the history of convict leasing in the area; writing code; experiencing the breakdown of the code due to the what statisticians refer to as “soft zeros” (values that appear as nothing, registered as absence or inactivity without confirmation of true non-existence); and finally experiencing her own personal breakdown, confirming and accepting what she already knew to be true: that for many, slavery only ended on a symbolic level, and its effects remain present across the US still today in the form of its carceral system.
Mimi Ọnụọha: ‘Soft Zeros,’ 2025-26, installation view at Secession // Photo by Sophie Pölzl
Following Ọnụọha on this fact-finding mission, we are taken on a deeply emotional and personal journey. Despite its specificity for the artist and her upbringing in Texas, the overwhelming takeaway is one of universality. The frustrating phone calls she records in the film, in which people working in official government record offices seem to have no knowledge of the convict leasing system’s existence in their counties, reveal the institutionalized nature of this cover-up, and just how bottomless it might be. The film not only exposes the algorithmic bias at work, but the amount of information that is deliberately withheld, or perhaps wilfully forgotten, at all levels amounts here to a glitch in the most concerted attempt to form a new narrative. Leaving the exhibition and passing through the caution tape once more, we are compelled to feel this neglect fully as our common failing.
Exhibition Info
Secession
Mimi Ọnụọha: ‘Soft Zeros’
Exhibition: Nov. 29, 2025-Feb. 22, 2026
secession.at
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna, Austria, click here for map
