This show brings together performance, video and participatory works developed over the past two decades in the UK and internationally.

Originally conceived for Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, this collection of works highlights the breadth of Offeh’s practice and his distinctive use of humour, performance and collaboration to explore contemporary social and political questions.

For The Exchange, the exhibition has been reconfigured to include Joy Inside Our Tears, an immersive video installation examining the relationship between trauma, social dancing and collective joy.

Drawing on popular music, film and wider cultural references, the works explore themes of identity, race, class and social conformity, examining how cultural narratives shape individual and collective experience. In Covers, for example, Offeh re-enacts archival album sleeve photographs by Black singers from the 1970s and 1980s, creating a series of static, durational tableaux. Four Ways to Feel Amazing borrows from the visual language of magazines and self-help manuals, presenting a four-step guide to a better life through the figure of a Black everyman, while Snap Like a Diva celebrates the New York ballroom scene and Black queer subcultures.

The exhibition title borrows lyrics from Portishead’s 1994 song It Could Be Sweet. The song was formative for Offeh, who listened to it repeatedly while studying an Art Foundation course at Middlesex University in 1995, resonating with its sense of possibility and freedom.

Across his practice, Offeh engages with ideas of happiness, play and Afrofuturism, creating opportunities for participation, collaboration and shared experience.

There will be a programme of events running alongside the exhibition.

Harold Offeh: Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet is organised by Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge. Our special thanks to Guy Hayward and the team at Kettle’s Yard for their generous support in enabling us to bring the exhibition to Penzance.