“Touch Products” is an inventive art exhibition about migration and consumer culture

Okokon is the product of an alliance of immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana, the latter once called the Gold Coast by Europeans because of the abundant gold market that flourished there. This focus on cash and commerce is evident throughout “Touch Products.”

Okokon’s tactile manipulation of matter is perhaps most evident in “The Breadwinner,” a large-scale collage made from recycled billboards from Accra. In it, a female figure is wrapped in vipers emitting currency, including American bills. She carries trays of money, her eyes closed. “The Breadwinner” is an homage to Okokon’s mother, and in this presentation, Okokon elevates her status to mythology. Layers of material unfurl around the figure, and the letters “aroma” float above her head like a halo. (Royal Aroma grated rice, originally imported to Africa because European audiences didn’t want it, eventually became a delicacy and a staple of West African cuisine—a site of meaning created out of necessity.)

Through collage and digital manipulation, Okokon shows that he knows who he is. This exhibition invites you to see yourself and confront who you are.

In its Afrosurrealist moments, Okokon’s work evokes a kind of parallel world. On four repurposed Panasonic television screens, transformed into prints through the venerable method of cyanotype photography, ghostly figures float in expanses of blue. The figures in the works are drawn from Ghanaian television and include advertisements for megachurches, accounts of “concert nights,” and coming-of-age tropes—cultural flotsam whose oceanic adornments evoke other ghosts trapped in the wake between Ghana’s coast, the Atlantic Ocean, and the United States. These found television screens, discarded and profane, are reclaimed and made sacred.

“Heavenly Bodies” (2024) is a zoomed-in cross-section of a televised explosion of matter, stardust, or static electricity. “Flash of Light or Darkness” is the final image of this visual remix of African television, with clouds of pigment reconciling a dark figure, seemingly about to step out of the screen and into the gallery.

Another series of four prints depicts men with constellations of scars adorning their faces. The posters, with names like “Elite Cuts,” mimic the familiar barbershop posters commonly found in black barbershops across the country. In “The Fine Cut” (2024), a raised and intaglio silkscreen on paper with floating acrylic, four men are depicted in a wash of blue pigment. Okokon uses beads as a form of braille and communication. The artist used the technique of intaglio collotype, and by layering threads and beads beneath the poster, he creates an effect that mimics African scarification.

The screenprints are inspired by posters Okokon purchased in Accra. He brought them back to the United States, then swapped the African models with African-American models from a barbershop poster in Atlanta—an Afropolitan exchange that underscores Okokon’s hybrid approach to form and meaning.

With “Touch Products,” Okokon taps into the collective memory of diasporic culture, which includes a sense of reuse and remembrance across time and space.

This includes painful memories: The Gold Coast is also where slaves were stripped of their history and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Okokon evokes this legacy in a presentation of four assemblage sculptures installed in 19th-century chests found in Ghana. The sculptures embedded in each chest are interpolations of traditional Akan casts, American basketball trophies, and wood carvings created in Ghana in dialogue with Ghanaian artists.

In “Nsibidi Loops (Plenty Money)” (2024), Okokon placed two screens in one of these sea chests. On one monitor, the artist animated pictograms from the Nsibidi writing system; on the other, he mixed found television footage, an AI-generated voice, pop music, digital animation, and sound to translate them, in a glossy, meme-ized mashup of Y2K Nollywood aesthetics.

“Touch Products” is a debut exhibition that arrests the viewer with its magnanimity and urgency. Okokon’s odes to consumer culture also pose the question of what is most precious to us. What will our relics and reliquaries be at the end of this Earth? It is a meditation on ancestry and heritage, in which the artist’s recycling of materials creates monuments to his homeland and invites viewers to consider their own mortality and connection to this dying Earth.

3330 Cady’s Alley NW. 202-893-9797.