Mmmm ... Mm-mm. Mmmmmwwwwwmmm. MMM. Sometimes sexy and sometimes sleepy, sometimes like a kid making airplane noises or doing an impression of a creaking door or maybe a whale, the sound of Harold Offeh humming and ummming fills the lobby of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Mmm, he goes, mmm-mm-mm. He up-speaks and mumbles and wrings a whole world of feeling out of this disembodied overture. The title of Offeh’s show, including that Mmm, is a quote, from a song on Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy. “Gotta try a little harder / It could be sweet,” runs the lyric, which is also printed in big gloopy lettering on the gallery walls, behind Offeh’s video screens, his photographs and other graphic interventions. The show blares and jostles with life, with song and dance, with skits and routines, with public moments and private performances on the loo and in the bathroom.
For more than two decades Offeh has been a moving target. Here’s the Ghanaian-born Offeh as Haroldinho, in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, shuffling samba steps and wearing typical, Brazilian blue worker’s overalls, his adopted name appliqued on the back. Dancing in the streets and on the beach, he sways and smiles, an object of mild curiosity to passersby. In Rio, people often assumed he was Brazilian. Here he is again, now on the streets and shopping centres of Walsall, Oxford, Liverpool and Chester, in Stockholm and Banff, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, wearing a Victorian-era magnifying lens in front of his face, which distorts and exaggerates his features. Given the suspicious looks he gets on the British streets, you worry for his safety.
