Ima-Abasi Okon’s “Incorporeal hereditaments like Love [can] Set(s) You Free…”

On the occasion of Michael Asher’s 1977 exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, its then-director Rudi Fuchs described the space as a sanctum. Built in 1936 to house the collection of colonial tobacco industrialist Henri van Abbe, the city council “hardly knew what to do” with this cultural institution in the “exclusively industrial city” of Eindhoven. Crossing its threshold, however, visitors would find respite in the interior’s neoclassical symmetry: “The outside world becomes a memory,” concluded Fuchs.1

Ima-Abasi Okon loosens the sanctum’s protocol by offering options for how to enter her exhibition, via a facing pair of athletic blue PVC arches, Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (2025).2 Both lead onto Fortunate (2025), 130 contiguous meters of time-tracking mats used in running competitions, equipped with lube, sensor systems, and monitoring devices that together serve as the show’s guiding structure as well as a contemporary scroll; the orange of the mats’ center, held between their dark edges, made for an abstract sunset stalling on a rubber horizon. Okon—a dedicated runner since the Covid-19 pandemic—has thus turned the museum’s ten galleries into a track without a finish line but with breakout nooks that feature earlier “personal” works. These include gestural prints resembling blown-up journal excerpts, with scribbled phrases such as “Call Him” (Documents which occur when I am not making or thinking but feeling and thinking and needing to move something, 2010–15).

Okon’s condensation of multiple bodies of work from the past couple of years, along with newly commissioned pieces, doesn’t pretend to transform the art venue into a place it is not—a sports center, say—other than in the “quotational” vein of the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh: think “levelling up” or “level playing field”. As if to dispel any lingering illusions to the contrary, an earlier video portrays a romantic Rückenfigur framed by a rugged terrain, sporting a Supreme X North Face jacket patterned with the words “By Any Means Necessary,” a political agitation attributed to Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (Capture Mechanism Bypass for Surplus—aChoreographic-Logic-Complex Dub (anticipatory talk back), 2018).

A digital clock that displays the continuously resetting time accrued by visitors collectively browsing and conspiring rather than competing in this exhibition may pay indirect homage to Asher’s and stanley brouwn’s late-seventies presentations at this museum. Asher had the ceiling’s diffuser panels removed and reinstalled while brouwn accumulated a minimalist visualization of his walks traversing actual and imaginary distances.3 Here and elsewhere, Okon’s interest in such legacies of sculpting time and movement, however, foreground a sensitivity to the difference between lifetime and lifestyle, particularly in the context of monetized care and public health designed around society’s “fittest.”

The artist’s sculptural arrangements stage moments of crisis—tipping-points of either recovery or deterioration—but do so aslant, eschewing any explicit reference to potential historical subtexts, be they colonialism in Africa or slavery in the Americas. Yet the rolled, earthy, and pungent reclaimed athletic tracks that make up Capacitiesplural (2025) are presented on shipping pallets in such a way that these recall tropical raw goods for importation and refinement, a colonial after-image amplified by the accompanying flatscreen that shows palm trees gently swaying. Seen another way, these relics point back to performance and exercise as collective, connective rituals, a concept the show ultimately seeks to reanimate.

Minimalist as such works appear, Okon conceives sculpture as alchemical concoctions, considering the use and abuse of substance(s). The artist’s proprietary blend of millennial cash crops (Ashwagandha, Lion’s Mane), old-fashioned oxtail, and New World scotch bonnet are attached in vacuum-sealed sachets to Mahalias (2014–25), a suite of faux-exotic veneer panels and quasi-abstract “portraits” of singer and civil rights icon Mahalia Jackson. Elsewhere, packs of freeze-dried coconut water supplement aluminum floor studs and financial aid forms as if to better sustain what Benjamin Buchloh once termed the “aesthetic of administration,” essentially protocols like zoning or immigration.   Other works are laced with morphine and gold—mentioned in the materials lists but as invisible as the hard and good luck these respective elements evoke. 

Drab office-ceiling panels hung low dramatically cut the circuit in half, and most viewers would be unable complete the track without dropping to all fours to navigate M-C-M… (dated 2019–25, the title refers to “Money-Commodity-Money,” Marx’s primary law of exponential profit). An atmospheric overdub of Jodeci’s “Cry For You” (1993) emanates from a Leslie speaker at the gallery’s inaccessible center, connoting the expanded keys of Jimi Hendrix and the “psychedelic” phases of the Beach Boys and the Beatles.

Incorporeal hereditament is a legal term for inherited, intangible privileges, originally concerning land and property, specifically hunting or harvesting. Love, cited in the title of this show, is not typically considered an example of this concept but is of course integral to its association with ancestry, class, and ownership. Okon’s parsing of related cultural paradigms, from self-optimization of the aughts to self-care of 2010s and current more basic attempts to stay sane and safe, implies that love is a drug as timely as it’s scarce.



Editors' note: This text was updated on September 22 after an earlier version with slightly different wording was published in error.