Red fabric moves in the air of a gallery. A voice comes from farther into the room, and the light changes as a visitor walks toward it. Paul Maheke called his 2019 Marseille exhibition OOLOI, after the third-gender beings in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis novels. He did not make a portrait of one of Butler’s alien characters for the wall. He made a space in which presence could be sensed before it could be neatly identified. A figure from speculative fiction became a method for changing how a room might be seen, heard and entered.
Maheke works across performance, installation, video, sculpture and dance. Born in France, with Congolese family roots, he is based in Montpellier according to his gallery biography. His work asks what happens when a person has been made either too visible under a dominant gaze or invisible within public history. He is interested in ghosts, water, unfamiliar beings and bodies that cannot be held within a fixed category. These figures create possibilities for perception. A visitor can feel a sound, follow a moving fabric or watch a gesture without first deciding which identity it represents.
That concern gives his engagement with Butler a precise force. The Ooloi are neither a costume nor an easy metaphor for every form of difference. In a conversation about the exhibition, Maheke connects Butler's fiction to his interest in bodies, relation and change. The artist’s installation transfers that question into the visitor’s encounter with material space.
An Oslo commission later brought the speculative method into a performance on museum steps. In The Origin of Death, a vampire figure, science fiction, diaristic notes, movement and music met in public. These are distinct projects made with different collaborators and sites. Their connection lies in Maheke’s refusal to let the extraordinary be treated as an escape from social life. An alien or vampire can make the familiar rules of seeing a body suddenly strange. The room, the pavement and the people standing there remain real.
A third presence in the room
The Friche la Belle de Mai programme presented OOLOI in Marseille during the summer of 2019. It describes an exhibition moving among installation, video and performance, concerned with marginalised subjectivities and the possibility of approaching history through a nonhuman or invisible body. The venue’s account stresses appearances that do not settle into one clear form. Images, texts, objects and sound make an environment in which visitors move between partial clues.
The title gives the space a literary point of departure. Butler’s Ooloi disrupt a binary understanding of sex and inheritance within the Xenogenesis trilogy. Maheke speaks in his Imago Mundi conversation about the multiple, complex pasts and futures that such characters allow him to consider. The gallery becomes an experiment in what can be known without forcing an unfamiliar form into a familiar label. A viewer does not meet an illustrated novel. They meet the effect of one of its most unsettling ideas translated into light, cloth and sound.
An e-flux critic’s visit records red gauze, filtered windows, fans and a voice suspended in the exhibition. The cloth shifts because air moves through it. Light passes through layers of material, changing the depth of the space as the visitor moves. A sound that first seems ambient becomes speech when approached. These are practical devices, but they change the certainty with which the room can be mapped. The visitor’s position alters what is heard.
The voice track includes a clairvoyant’s reading that Maheke had received, according to the critic’s account. That detail gives the installation a startling portrait of the artist without putting a conventional likeness at its centre. Someone else’s account of Maheke’s energy travels through a speaker; the visitor hears it while looking at fabric and light. The body is present through a description that cannot be verified by sight, and through the room’s effects on another body. The work asks a person to attend to what an image leaves out.
Maheke has spoken about using glass and copper because they can conduct energy. In the Imago Mundi interview, he resists the idea that an artwork’s visible image carries all its meaning. A person’s bodily relation to material matters, even when it cannot be presented as a tidy visual message. This is why OOLOI can invoke speculative life without producing a picture of an alien. Its altered conditions of sensing are the work’s imaginative terrain.
The materials also make the environment vulnerable. Gauze moves; a fan makes a sound; a filtered window changes with daylight. A fully controlled spectacle could preserve the same appearance for every visitor. Maheke’s installation depends instead on where someone stands, how long they stay and which sound reaches them first. It invites an individual encounter while acknowledging that no individual view can exhaust the space. The third presence suggested by the title is less an object to discover than a relation that keeps changing.
The body as an archive
Maheke’s earlier performance and installation A Fire Circle for a Public Hearing gives another form to the problem of legibility. In a 2018 conversation about the work, he describes placing a camera on a ceiling fan while dancing in a studio. The spinning image became part of an environment with performance, lowered curtains and sound. The camera does not give a stable, authoritative view of the dancer. It moves with a mechanical rhythm over a moving body, making a familiar act of documentation dizzying.
That filming decision is small and radical. A fixed camera can imply that a body has been captured for the viewer to inspect. On the fan, the lens shares in a motion it cannot fully master. The resulting footage can become a timer, Maheke says, a circulation that continues in the room. The performer’s gestures and the projected image do not coincide as a single identity statement. They produce different temporalities of the same body: one present and changing, the other recorded and revolving.
In the conversation, Maheke connects the work to cosmology, water and forms of resistance that do not depend on direct opposition alone. The scale of a rotating studio camera expands into questions about the world’s larger movements. That expansion could sound grand if the work did not keep the device so ordinary. The fan is a household machine. Its circular movement makes a cosmic thought accessible through something a visitor can recognise.
The artist has described the body as carrying narratives that may not be visible to an observer. In a first-person AnOther interview, he asks how identity might be addressed beyond the usual representational demands. For a Black queer artist, becoming visible in a museum need not mean offering a complete explanation of the self to anyone who asks. A movement can be deliberate, powerful and resistant while keeping part of its knowledge with the person who makes it.
That insistence does not make the work inaccessible. A visitor can still feel a rhythm or follow a gesture. The freedom lies in refusing the expectation that the encounter must end with a definitive account of someone else’s identity. Maheke’s choreography invites relation rather than possession. A body can communicate without becoming a document for the viewer’s filing system.
A vampire on the museum steps
The Origin of Death took place outdoors at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo as part of a commission shared with institutions in Prague and Paris. The museum describes a performance using science fiction, diary-like notes, sketches, found and artist-written texts, music and movement. Musicians Ndobo-emma and Adrian Barstad Andresen performed in collaboration with Maheke. Their credited participation matters because the work’s sound was made with them, not simply added to the performer’s gestures afterward.
The figure through which the performance considers difference is a vampire. A vampire is familiar from many stories, yet never quite belongs among the living or the dead. It has a body that can pass through a crowd while carrying an unsettling relation to time. Maheke uses that figure to explore the border between alterity and otherness, in the museum’s description. The difference between those terms is felt when a person is encountered as complex and changing, or instead fixed as a stranger by someone else’s judgement.
The choice of the steps matters. Museum stairs are a route into an institution; they are also a public place where a passer-by might stop without planning to enter a gallery. A performance there makes the threshold active. It takes a speculative creature, fragments of personal text and live music out of the protected room into an ordinary path of movement. The vampire does not belong to an invented gothic set. It appears within the social architecture that determines who feels welcome at a cultural institution.
The French presentation at Lafayette Anticipations brought a different group of collaborators to its Paris iteration from those named in the Oslo programme. What continues across settings is the method: movement and sound carry texts of different kinds into a live encounter. A diary note may have one scale of intimacy; a science-fiction reference another. The body can hold them together for a time without flattening their differences.
Maheke told Elephant that figure skating in childhood helped shape his relation to performance. The detail is illuminating because skating is an art of controlled movement on an unstable surface. A performer learns to make a turn look fluent while negotiating balance, speed and the possibility of a fall. Maheke’s gallery and outdoor works use different materials, but they retain the interest in how a body navigates a space that does not simply yield to it.
Water refuses a fixed shape
Water runs through Maheke’s practice as a medium of memory and movement. In The River Asked for a Kiss, presented by Somerset House, he responded to the death of Gambian refugee Pateh Sebally in a Venetian canal. He made light curtains for a pavilion window, extending a Langston Hughes poem with his own words. The window remained open so wind could move the fabric. The memorial was not a fixed wall text. Air and cloth changed it in time.
The work’s material choices resist a dangerous romance of the sea. Water has carried migration, nourished life and caused death. In the Somerset House interview, Maheke says he wanted to complicate a narrative that might otherwise seem obvious. The floating fabric can recall water without reproducing the viral image of a person drowning. The work gives the visitor a relation to absence that does not make another person’s final moments into spectacle.
Water also changes shape without losing continuity. This quality helps Maheke think through identities that have been made rigid by social classification. In a conversation with H.P., he connects water and hydrofeminist thought with a search for resistance that does not exhaust the person resisting. A river can move around an obstacle while still exerting force. The analogy does not solve political violence, but it gives the artist another way to construct space and movement.
The curtain’s motion asks for patient attention. It may lift, settle or change direction with a gust. A visitor cannot command the sequence. In OOLOI, fans animate gauze; here, outdoor air does the work. Both pieces allow movement beyond the artist’s moment-to-moment control. They make the environment a collaborator and give the spectator a role that is less like reading a verdict than witnessing an event.
Krull’s interview with Berlin-based Kya Kyani offers a different artist’s account of making music and image while moving between identities and cities. Maheke’s performance remains its own inquiry into bodies, water and speculative figures. The link broadens the conversation about how a creative person can make a space for complexity without becoming a ready-made symbol for someone else’s idea of Black culture.
What an alien changes
The Ooloi, the vampire and the ghost do not describe the same being. Butler’s character unsettles inherited categories of sex and reproduction; the vampire moves between life and death; a ghost gives absence a form of return. Maheke uses each where its particular uncertainty can change a situation. To turn them all into one general metaphor for marginality would lose the formal intelligence of the work.
In OOLOI, the viewer must move through a changing room to hear a voice. In The Origin of Death, the audience encounters a performer and musicians at a museum threshold. In The River Asked for a Kiss, a curtain moves in air beside a history of water, violence and loss. Each work invites perception while limiting the claim that a person can be completely known by looking. The science-fiction reference reaches a public through fabric and frequency; the vampire enters a real staircase; the memorial refuses a sensational image.
Maheke’s future is not an immaculate elsewhere. It begins when the present loses the certainty that its categories are complete. A body can be more than the role assigned to it. A room can carry a presence no picture can fully hold. A sound can change where the listener thinks they are. His works make those possibilities physical, then leave enough space for another person to encounter them on their own terms.