VIENNA.- What can we truly know about ourselves and our histories in an age of hypervisibility, when algorithms and social structures alike decide not only what is seen but what is pushed into invisibility or irrelevance?

In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha examines the unreliability of archives and the instability of knowledge, exploring how absence and silence – shaped by algorithmic bias, historical denial, and collective forgetting – become meaningful. She points to what has not been collected, asked, allowed, or represented.

Some statisticians use the term 'soft zero' to describe values that appear as nothing – registered as absence or inactivity – without confirmation of true non-existence. A dataset showing no entries for a certain demographic group does not prove that the group is absent; it only reveals that it was not recorded. Ọnụọha uses this as a metaphor for power and invisibility within data systems, showing how emptiness itself is politically produced. In addition, language tools such as ChatGPT generate knowledge from existing datasets, reproducing linguistic and canonical biases – favouring anglophone, Western, and institutional perspectives while marginalising informal, queer, decolonial, and speculative ones. Trained to be ‘helpful’, such systems stabilise rather than challenge the status quo.

Ọnụọha, by contrast, seeks to create new forms of data that render the systematically excluded visible. The docu-fiction film Ground Truths (2025), which forms the heart of the exhibition, follows the artist’s attempt to train a machine-learning model to locate potential mass graves across Texas. What begins as a technical experiment unfolds into a reflection on the limits of collective memory – on what we document, what we recall, and what we allow to disappear.

Like all the newly produced works in Soft Zeros, Ground Truths is triggered by the silence and ignorance that determined the history of the so-called ‘Sugar Land 95’, whose presence haunts the exhibition without being shown directly. ‘Sugar Land 95’ refers to the remains of ninety-five Black individuals discovered in 2018 during construction for a new school in Sugar Land, Texas, close to Ọnụọha’s childhood home. They had been forced to work under the convict leasing system, a form of re-enslavement that emerged after the formal abolition of slavery. In this system, Americans, especially but not exclusively Black ones, were arrested – often on fabricated charges – and leased to private companies as cheap labour. The remains belonged to prisoners who worked on the Imperial State Prison Farm, producing sugar for the region’s industries, hence the name ‘Sugar Land’.

Few official records existed about these individuals; their deaths and identities were absent from public archives. Their discovery reveals how institutional systems produce erasure. The story of the Sugar Land 95 exposes the continuity between slavery and today’s prison-industrial complex. The Thirteenth Amendment legalised forced labour, enabling states to re-enslave Black people and criminalise other groups deemed ‘undesirable’ through mass arrests. In the U.S., that legacy persists: Black men remain incarcerated at disproportionately high rates, and in some Southern states, prisons still operate on former plantation lands. In Soft Zeros,Ọnụọha positions the Sugar Land 95 as a stand-in for all of the violence and oppression that can be made to disappear through wilful collective forgetting – a reminder that what is buried isn’t gone.

In everything you bury will come back up again (2025), two large photographs – one on the wall, one on the floor – show hands digging into the earth. It is unclear whether the person is burying or unearthing the depicted objects: a vintage sack once used to ship processed sugar and two hand-carved wooden dice from the nineteenth century – the only personal objects found on site that spoke to the Sugar Land 95 as people, not prisoners. everything you bury will come back up again is surrounded by boundary tape printed with phrases that evade culpability, a gesture echoed by the work’s title no one told me (2025) – one of several expressions that replace accountability with denial. In we don’t talk about that (2025), Ọnụọha refers wryly to the broader structures that produce social and historical invisibility with a raised mound covered by artificial grass – an absurdist homage to what lies hidden in plain sight. The fake lawn evokes the manicured surface of suburban order, where violence and erasure are literally buried underground.

In her research-based practice, Ọnụọha ultimately asks what forms of knowledge are withheld from us in an environment shaped by disinformation and polarisation – and which role we play in this forgetting. As she writes: ‘To reckon with the present is to learn how to read what seemingly isn’t there.’

Mimi Ọnụọha was born in Italy in 1989 and lives in New York.

Curated by Jeanette Pacher