Emeka Ogboh

The Imane Farès gallery is pleased to present B(l)ackroom, the third solo exhibition by Emeka Ogboh at the gallery.

B(l)ackroom is an immersive installation that explores the intersections of language, consumption, and power through the figure of the backroom—a semi-private space where access, belonging, and visibility are quietly negotiated. By merging “backroom” with “blackroom,” the project transforms opacity into a critical position, resisting the demands of transparency and the systems of classification that have historically shaped Black and migrant lives.

Structured as a sequence of interconnected spaces, the installation moves from a darkened café-like environment to a text and sound installation. At its center is Sufferhead Original Gin, conceived as a liquid artwork and the distilled continuation of Sufferhead Original, a beer first developed for documenta14 as a sensory critique of European projections onto African migration.
Through distillation, the stout is transformed into a clear gin that nevertheless retains the traces of its origins, becoming a metaphor for migration, translation, loss, and recomposition.

Rather than relying on images, B(l)ackroom foregrounds language, taste, and atmosphere as sites where colonial histories and contemporary forms of exclusion persist. Visitors encounter texts, voices, and fragments drawn from philosophy, poetry, colonial discourse, and bureaucratic language, which appear without hierarchy or fixed narrative. Refusing explanation or resolution,
the work asserts the right to opacity while exposing how empire, migration, and racialized identities continue to be shaped through naming, consumption, regulation, and everyday acts. Both convivial and critical, B(l)ackroom invites audiences to experience history not as representation, but as something embodied, tasted, and continually negotiated.

On the occasion of the exhibition opening on 21 June 2026, the artist presents the second chapter of Fête de la Synesthesia II. Building on the inaugural edition held in 2023, the event transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation, where taste, scent, sound, and image converge. The evening begins with a performative tasting of Sufferhead Original Gin led by Emeka
Ogboh, followed by a DJ set by the artist and an olfactory installation developed in collaboration with Hervé Domar.