On a rooftop above Peckham, an imagined spacecraft became a place for other people’s predictions. Harold Offeh’s Hail the New Prophets was built for a London car park, a structure usually devoted to the practical business of arriving, parking and leaving. He used that elevated, ordinary site to ask for more adventurous uses of the mind. Visitors and contributors were invited to propose futures through words, images, music and performance. The ship was conspicuous, but its destination was never an invented planet. It was the public’s capacity to say what might happen next.
That question of who gets to speak about the future runs through Offeh’s Afrofuturist work. A prophet is usually imagined as a singular figure with privileged access to what others cannot see. His project makes the role plural. The spaceship can carry many predictions, including ones that disagree. It is a piece of sculpture, a broadcasting device and a reason for people to gather around an unfamiliar proposition. Its formal oddity opens the encounter; the voices that follow determine whether the encounter has any life beyond spectacle.
Offeh was born in Accra and grew up in Britain. His work moves among performance, photography, video and projects made with participants. The Power Plant’s artist biography places his practice across these media and records later exhibitions in the UK and abroad. The range is not a list of interchangeable formats. A photograph can frame one body in one pose; a workshop can allow others to change a project’s direction; a fictional organization can make an institution’s habits visible. Offeh chooses forms according to the social encounter he wants to create.
A ship above the city
Hail the New Prophets was commissioned for Bold Tendencies in 2021. In a first-person interview with Art Fund, Offeh described a scale model of a spaceship inspired by Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place. He imagined a slightly hovering form with two flame-like eye shapes and trailing extensions, placed against a panorama of London. The car park’s roof mattered: it offered a view of the existing city from which its possible futures could be considered. An object associated with interstellar travel was brought into a working urban landscape whose inhabitants know that change is rarely distributed evenly.
Offeh asked people to send predictions, manifestos, poems, drawings, photographs, music and video. Their contributions could be broadcast or performed around the ship. The commission was exhibited on the rooftop from May to September 2021, as Art Fund records. The sculpture served as a focal point for a collection of voices rather than a monument to the artist’s solitary vision.
This arrangement changes the familiar image of a spaceship. In many science fiction stories, a ship arrives with a leader, an instruction or a threat. Offeh’s ship asks a question. It does not transport a chosen few away from the city. Its imaginary mobility helps people standing within that city speak across the limits of their current circumstances. The power of the work lies in that reversal: the spectacular form does not deliver the future from elsewhere; it elicits accounts of the future from those who are already here.
Sun Ra’s precedent is specific. Offeh saw Space Is the Place as an artistic manifesto as well as a film, one that used music, costume and a cosmic narrative to open political possibilities for Black life. He also connected the ship to the Middle Passage and to Marcus Garvey’s attempts to imagine routes of return. The same vessel can therefore recall forced transport and become a figure for chosen movement. Offeh does not pretend that one image settles that history. He uses its contradictions to give the public a charged object around which to think.
The submitted futures were not required to be utopian. In Art Fund’s account, contributors raised the environment, Black Lives Matter, universal basic income, food, clothes and technologies. Such a mix refuses the idea that speculation belongs only to engineers or professional science fiction writers. Clothing and meals belong to daily life; income and ecology belong to collective systems. A prediction can begin from either scale. Offeh’s project asked participants to notice that the future is made in decisions about ordinary arrangements as well as in grand announcements.
The first mothership
The Peckham ship continued a line of work Offeh had opened in 2006 with The Mothership Collective at South London Gallery. There he invited artists, musicians and members of the public into an installation that grew through events. People could make a funk track, spend a day as an alien in Peckham, try intergalactic speed dating, meditate, write science fiction or make an alien video message. The activities were playful, but the word alien had a pointed social charge. It described a science fiction visitor and echoed a term often used to mark a person as foreign in their own city.
A conventional exhibition can be complete when it opens; The Mothership Collective accumulated work as the weeks progressed. That temporal structure let the audience alter the installation. Someone who entered to view art could leave having contributed sound, words or a performance. The gallery became less like a spacecraft displayed behind glass and more like a place where a crew was being assembled. Participation was not decoration placed around a fixed central object. It was the process by which the work gathered its form.
The music of George Clinton and Sun Ra supplied a language for the project, including the mothership as an emblem of collective arrival. Offeh’s website names many collaborators, among them Kodwo Eshun, Barby Asante, David Blandy and Ming Wong. Their presence matters because the work was never the image of one artist impersonating a whole community. It was a structure for different skills and imaginations to meet. Music, design, performance and writing could all address who belongs in the space of the future.
The 2006 project also clarifies why Offeh returned to a ship in 2021. Repetition here is not simple nostalgia for a familiar Afrofuturist symbol. The two works place the vessel in different social conditions. The gallery project drew people into an evolving indoor installation. The later rooftop commission called outward across a city during a period marked by pandemic, protest and argument about public life. Each asks how an image from Black speculative culture can become a prompt for voices beyond the artist’s own.
The relationship between a gallery and its neighbours remains important. A mothership can be dazzling without altering who feels invited to enter. Offeh built activities that required no specialist vocabulary: making a track, writing a story, adopting an alien persona, meeting another person. These are simple actions, but they move the audience from looking at a future to trying one out. The invitation can also expose discomfort. What if a participant has never been asked to imagine a public future? What if an apparently light game reveals who is accustomed to being heard? The project makes those questions part of its form.
Bodies rehearsing another image
Offeh’s concern with futures grows from a sustained interest in how people inhabit historical images. In a MIMA interview, he described his Covers series, in which he reenacted album-cover poses associated with Black women singers of the 1970s and 1980s. He studied the originals, adopted their bodily arrangements and often placed the source image near his own performance. For the duration of an album track, he might hold a pose in front of viewers. The act of imitation slowed down an image that popular culture had taught people to recognize quickly.
A pose can appear effortless in a photograph. Holding it for several minutes makes its labour and construction visible. The body has to find where the weight sits, how the hands behave and which angle lets a gesture read as intended. Offeh’s reenactment is neither a claim to become the singer nor a parody that dismisses her. It is a form of close looking carried through muscle and time. A viewer sees both the admired original and the imperfect, living attempt to inhabit it. The difference between them makes the design of the image newly apparent.
This practice helps explain the spacecraft projects. Offeh does not merely quote Sun Ra’s mothership as a recognizable emblem. He asks what the emblem can do when moved into another place and another group of bodies. Reenactment becomes a tool for testing an inherited image rather than preserving it unchanged. The album cover, the cinematic ship and the rooftop sculpture all have prior lives; Offeh gives them new audiences and asks what can be learned from the distance between the old context and the new performance.
His older work Alien at Large used another body-worn device. A magnifying glass mounted on his face enlarged his lips as he walked through public spaces. The gesture made a racist habit of scrutiny visible and awkward. Onlookers had to decide whether to acknowledge the figure before them, turn away or treat the alteration as entertainment. The work’s science fiction title joined the everyday language of racial othering to an image of extraterrestrial difference. Here the alien did not arrive in a ship; he was made by the gaze of people sharing a street.
That early street action had no scripted audience response. A public performance can fail, or elicit reactions the artist cannot control. Its openness gave Offeh another way to study how an image operates socially. The magnifying glass physically exaggerated a feature that a hostile gaze might already overemphasize. By carrying the device himself, he put the mechanism of exaggeration outside the observer’s head, where it could be seen and judged. The work’s discomfort is distinct from the welcoming activities of The Mothership Collective, but both use a speculative figure to examine an ordinary social boundary.
A fictional betterment society
Science and imagined institutions enter his work through another route in The Betterment Society. Developed for Cambridge researchers in 2018, it presented a fictional group through which Offeh and invited artists explored medical research, care and the values hidden inside claims of improvement. The word betterment sounds straightforward until someone asks who defines better, for whom, and by what measure. A fictional society gives the question a theatrical frame. It can mimic the authority of an institution while making that authority available for inspection.
Offeh invited Frederica Agbah and collaborators Jack Scott and Louis-Jack Horton-Stephens into the project. Their different contributions responded to researchers’ ambitions at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. This is another example of collaboration as part of an artwork’s thinking. A scientific programme often presents itself through highly specialized language and carefully managed evidence. Artists can ask about assumptions that the official language treats as already settled. The point is not to replace research with fantasy. It is to make the ethical and imaginative choices surrounding research easier to notice.
The Betterment Society is not identical to Hail the New Prophets, but the two works share an interest in who is authorized to describe a desired future. One uses a fictional association beside real biomedical work; the other uses a spacecraft in a car park. In both, Offeh builds a frame that looks sufficiently familiar to invite entry and sufficiently strange to prevent easy agreement. His humour is a method of opening a serious question, not a way to avoid it.
The city as a source of knowledge
Offeh’s participatory work also reaches beyond explicitly Afrofuturist objects. In Walk the Talk in Milton Keynes, he invited residents to guide him through their neighbourhoods. Their knowledge of places became the basis for a collective map made from decorated tablecloths, sculpted candles, plates and food. A city plan normally privileges roads and measurable distances. This map held memories, recipes and stories as forms of navigation. Its materials were social rather than purely geographic.
That project helps place the rooftop ship in a wider practice. Offeh repeatedly creates structures through which knowledge already held by participants can become public. The future predictions in Peckham did not arise from an empty field; they came from people with histories and present concerns. The guided walks in Milton Keynes likewise depended on residents whose expertise would be easy to overlook in an official account of the city. He does not simply give voice to people who had none. He changes the situation in which their existing voices can be heard.
There is a Nordic thread in his exhibition history. The Power Plant biography records a 2016 exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen; his CV also lists a 2016 project at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde. These connections do not make him a Nordic artist. They show that his questions about public space, collective futures and inherited images have travelled through European institutions while remaining grounded in his Ghanaian birth and British life.
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams asks what different histories might mean for a possible Congolese present and future. Offeh’s rooftop work asks another version of that question in London: whose imagination counts when tomorrow is being described? The projects use different media, yet both invite the reader to notice that a future image is made by someone in a particular place. Offeh’s difference is to turn spectators into possible authors. The ship’s odd shape is an invitation to submit a voice.
Prophecy as a shared practice
In the Art Fund interview, Offeh was clear that contributions to Hail the New Prophets might express fear as well as hope. This openness protects the work from becoming a demand for cheerful futurism. People experiencing unequal conditions have different reasons to welcome, resist or doubt a projected change. A public collection of predictions can hold those differences without asking one participant to stand for an entire community. The spaceship’s broadcast is plural by design.
The title Hail the New Prophets has the energy of an announcement, but its most radical gesture may be an ordinary invitation. Speak. Write. Draw. Imagine food or work or a city arranged differently. Offeh builds a sculpture that makes such actions feel worth gathering around. He takes an Afrofuturist symbol associated with visionary musicians and lets it become a means for others to practise vision. No one has to predict accurately to participate. The value is in claiming the right to formulate a future before someone else declares it inevitable.
That right is also tested in the smaller works. An album-cover pose can be inhabited instead of consumed at a glance. A magnified face can return the look that made it alien. A fictional betterment society can ask the scientists what improvement means. A table laid with locally made plates can carry a city’s less official map. These works vary in mood and scale, but each sets up a situation in which an apparently settled image or institution can be handled differently. Offeh’s futures begin in such acts of revision.
The ship above Peckham ultimately made no promise of rescue. It offered a vantage point, a vivid object and a channel through which the city could hear multiple possibilities. That is a more demanding form of Afrofuturism than decorating an existing future with cosmic signs. It asks people to use the signs, speak through them, argue over them and leave room for voices still to arrive. Offeh’s art keeps the future in the present tense of participation. The new prophets are not waiting inside the ship. They are the people around it, deciding what to say.