Ima-Abasi Okon’s ten-room immersive exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven raises questions about how ideas of health improvement – historically used to justify the appropriation of land in settler colonialism – function today in the drive to enhance our bodies. For Okon, health improvement reflects a drive not towards supporting wellbeing and garnering a holistic understanding of the body, but as a means of making us more productive workers. She examines it as a form of property, questioning how capitalism defines an “optimal” body and suggesting ways to resist these pressures. This line of interrogation begins with the exhibition title, in which the formalities of language are co-opted and made strange. Language becomes a means of grasping all that she is metabolising while making work, in this case, her interest in property and health.

During the pandemic, Okon took up the practice of road running as a leisure activity, which became a way to reflect on industrial and capitalist systems. Alongside this, a naturopathic practice in brewing, fermenting and dehydrating plants and foods to draw out their antioxidant, anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-atherosclerotic and anti-diabetic properties grew. This interest is reflected in the exhibition’s circuit of starter mats and obstacles, with timers that activate and deactivate as visitors move through the exhibition space. Recorded time is divorced from the performance of the individual and is measured collectively instead: through audience participation, the time recorded can be slowed down. 

In Okon’s circuit, she deliberately slows down a system typically associated with speed, proficiency and competition. The focus shifts to collective movement and alternative forms of validation, challenging conventional systems of power and approval. The installation provides ideas for how we can chart our own path, slow down, nourish, replenish, and strengthen ourselves as a “body-flesh”, to withstand the underlying systems of competition, property and land that demand an augmented version of ourselves. Through the exhibition, Okon reminds us that our bodies are not machines to perfect, but grounds to reclaim. .