A mother stands on a city street in the shape of a spacecraft. Zak Ové’s The Mothership Connection rises in coloured steel, crowned by a large Mende helmet mask whose translucent form catches light. The sculpture has the silhouette of a launch vehicle, but the artist has given it a history that cannot be launched away. Architectural details refer to buildings associated with Western power; masks and symbols recall African and diasporic traditions. The vessel is meant to carry people through an imagined future while making visible the labour and cultures that conventional monuments leave outside their stories.
Ové is a London-born artist of Trinidadian heritage whose work moves among sculpture, photography, film and installation. He has described The Mothership Connection in explicitly Afrofuturist terms. That word suits the rocket shape and the sonic memory of George Clinton’s Parliament, whose album gave the sculpture its title. Yet the work’s power comes from what has been built into the rocket. It is a craft made from histories of migration, colonial construction, masquerade and celebration. The future here is not a pristine departure lounge. It is a structure assembled out of things the present still needs to recognize.
First displayed in London’s Regent’s Park in 2023, the work later reached public sites including New York’s Meatpacking District. Its height, approaching nine metres, matters to the encounter. A viewer cannot take it in as a small precious object. It changes a square’s skyline. During daylight the metal and acrylic respond to the surrounding streets; when lit, the structure acts as a beacon. Ové has said he wanted children to run toward it with elation. That wish does not soften the historical argument. It places wonder beside it, asking whether a monument to overlooked contribution can also give pleasure to people who did not arrive expecting an art lesson.
A rocket made of histories
In a 2023 interview, Ové described the base as drawing on the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali. He combined it with African masks, Haitian veve signs, architectural elements associated with Masonic buildings and details from the United States Capitol. These sources do not form a seamless historical style. They belong to different places, belief systems and political histories. Their conjunction is the argument. A building celebrated as a monument to Western modernity may have been made through the work of people whose names do not appear in its public account. By joining architectural motifs to African and diasporic signs, Ové changes the image of who built the world from which a future might take off.
The vessel’s head is a large Mende helmet mask. Ové chose it for its association with women and healing ceremonies in Sierra Leone, giving the rocket a maternal identity. He has described rendering the mask in translucent red and blue acrylic, lit from within. The scale and material change the encounter with a form often confined, in Western institutions, to an ethnographic case. Acrylic does not imitate carved wood. Light passes through it. The mask appears to belong to a living, transformable present rather than an arrested past. Ové names the figure a mother, and the choice gives the entire sculpture a relation to care as well as flight.
Some details come from the twentieth-century popular culture through which Ové first learned to picture space. He recalls his father taking him to a Parliament performance in London in 1978, shortly after Star Wars appeared. George Clinton’s theatrical spaceship gave him an image of Black people arriving in the future on their own terms. American car fins, headlamps and the London BT Tower also enter his description of the sculpture. These references reveal how a young imagination can assemble a future from a concert stage, street architecture and televised machines. Ové does not hide those mixed sources in pursuit of a falsely pure African image. The ship belongs to a diaspora precisely because its materials and memories have traveled.
His account of the work returns to the construction of national landmarks. In Washington, DC, Ové noticed how monumental architecture could celebrate political power while leaving the Black labour that helped build it almost unseen. The Mothership Connection responds by placing the missing contribution into the monumental object itself. It does not offer a list of workers or pretend to supply an archive of individual names. It changes the shape through which viewers understand power. The spacecraft is built from signs of a modernity whose supposed owners were never its only makers.
Forty men in the square
Ové had asked a related question with The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness. At Somerset House in London in 2016, an installation of forty tall graphite-coloured male figures occupied the courtyard, as Ové’s gallery records in a contemporary account. The gallery’s fair account of the installation explains that each figure was developed from an ebony sculpture given to Ové by his father, filmmaker Horace Ové. The repeated body raises its hands in a gesture the artist reads as peace and nobility. Repetition makes the figures impossible to treat as a single decorative accent. They gather, occupy and alter a place whose own history is part of the work.
Somerset House was linked to the royal court where Ben Jonson’s 1605 Masque of Blackness was performed. The play’s Ethiopian water nymphs seek to change the colour of their skin to achieve a European ideal of beauty. Ové’s response sets forty Black figures in the building’s public courtyard, visible at a size and number that cannot be absorbed into the old fantasy. They make presence a physical fact. The work’s scale gives them agency in space, even as its title keeps the historical problem of invisibility in view.
The repeated figure came from a family object, then became an enlarged sculpture and finally a crowd. That route through scales matters. A gift between father and son became a public challenge to an inherited cultural image. The graphite finish gives the bodies a visual unity, while their raised arms establish a rhythm across the courtyard. Their sameness does not mean they are interchangeable people. It makes the viewer confront how repetition can turn an excluded figure into an architectural force. The space must adjust to them. From one side, the viewer sees a repeated posture; from another, the rows shift against the building behind them. The courtyard can no longer be read as an empty frame for an old drama. It is occupied by bodies of a scale usually reserved for the figures a nation chooses to monumentalize. Their raised hands make a gesture of peace at the same time that their number refuses any quiet removal from view.
Ové has said that a mask lets a wearer become another self, a spiritual transformation rather than a device for hiding. In the artist’s interview about the installation, he argues that the figures are not disappearing behind their masks. They assert a presence the historical account has denied. This is a decisive distinction. Invisibility is imposed by a public story, not a property of the bodies it overlooks. The masquerade gives Ové a form for moving beyond the roles others have assigned.
In another conversation about the sculptures, Ové suggests that they can be imagined as time travelers returning to investigate an obscured history. The direction of their travel is intriguing. They come from a future in order to read the past. Afrofuturism in this work is therefore a method of historical inquiry as well as visual invention. The figures’ imagined temporal distance allows a fresh look at familiar architecture. Their presence asks who was missing when the original story of the place was told.
The mask beyond the museum case
The mask runs through Ové’s sculptural language because it can hold more than one time. It may be associated with an older practice, yet it changes when a person wears it, when light strikes it, or when an artist gives it a new material and scale. In The Mothership Connection, the Mende-inspired head is a luminous crown. In The Invisible Men, masks turn repeated figures into presences capable of meeting the viewer’s gaze on altered terms. Both works ask an object to do something more active than stand as an emblem of heritage.
Ové’s use of acrylic and stainless steel makes this activity visible. The New York installation interview describes a transparent fibreglass head, molded acrylic masks and a steel structure engineered to feel light despite its scale. Transparency and reflection mean the sculpture changes with its surroundings. It does not bring an unchanging image of Africa to a city square. It reflects the city, catches its light and gives its passersby a place within the composition. The engineering that allows the work to stand becomes part of its improbable sense of hovering.
The distinction between public sculpture and gallery display is important to Ové. A museum visitor has chosen to encounter art; a person crossing a street may be thinking about a train, a shift at work or a meeting. A large public work has to make an invitation quickly without requiring every viewer to read a wall label. Ové wants the vessel to surprise and gather people. Its colour and height do that work before the viewer knows the names of its references. The deeper historical reading can arrive after the first experience of scale and light.
That sequence is one reason the work can bear a difficult account of labour without becoming a lesson illustrated in steel. Its first appeal is bodily. A passerby looks upward. A child notices the colour. A visitor sees a mask at a scale rarely granted to it in an ethnographic display. Then the object’s borrowed architectural forms may become legible. The piece works through discovery rather than a single message delivered at once.
Other ships, other audiences
Ové’s Black Starliner has also been discussed through Afrofuturism. Shown at Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2025, it extends his interest in a vehicle that can carry Black and diasporic history into an imagined tomorrow. In a first-person interview, Ové linked the work to the shortage of Black and Brown figures in many mainstream images of technological futurity. He recalled growing up with a narrative in which Western modernity was designated as the future and African ancestry was treated as what had to be left behind. A starliner refuses that division. The passenger does not have to discard a lineage to be imagined among the stars.
The title also turns the ship into a social image. A liner carries people; it suggests a journey shared with strangers rather than the solitary mission of a hero. Ové’s ships therefore differ from science-fiction objects that establish greatness through conquest or speed. They are vehicles of memory and assembly. The Mothership Connection is explicitly maternal, while Black Starliner gives a name to a collective passage. Neither promises that technology alone will undo historical injustice. Their imaginative work lies in who boards, what the vessel is made of and which histories become visible as it moves.
Krull’s essay on a visit to the 1-54 art fair in Marrakech offers a separate view of contemporary African and diasporic art in a public gathering place. Ové’s Invisible Men first appeared at the London edition of that fair, making the connection useful: a commercial art event also became the setting for a large intervention in the memory of a historic courtyard. The fair was not merely a backdrop. It brought different publics into contact with a sculpture whose meaning depended on where those publics stood.
To be seen in the future
Ové’s projects hold together celebration and a demand for historical recognition. The dancing memory of Parliament does not cancel the record of enslaved and indentured labour. The bright mask does not dissolve the old stereotype that treated African forms as static. The repeated men do not let Somerset House remain only an elegant architectural shell. Each work begins with a real visual pleasure and makes that pleasure carry a question about what the viewer has learned to overlook.
This is why the movement between The Invisible Men and The Mothership Connection feels consequential. The first work brings an excluded presence into an inherited civic space. The second imagines a vessel leaving from that altered ground. The order matters even if the artworks are encountered separately. Ové does not simply place Black figures in a ready-made future. He revises the visible past from which any future would have to depart.
A spacecraft normally points away from Earth. Ové’s points back to the materials of the world that built it. Its steel and acrylic may seem weightless in the city’s light, yet the structure stays grounded in architectural memory, family influence, masquerade and music. It is a monument that knows how to move, at least in the imagination. The vessel’s invitation is to travel without forgetting who made the departure possible.