Harold Offeh: The Mothership Collective 2:0 @ Tramway, Glasgow

At the end of my circuit around Harold Offeh’s interactive, child-friendly exhibition The Mothership Collective 2:0 at Tramway, with my drunkenly staggering, high-volume one-year-old son in tow, I turn to the seated invigilator and ask them: “Are you going insane?” They pointedly remove an earphone from their ear and look up at me from their book with a mixture of irony and plaintiveness: “It’s too much.” I can’t help cracking up. The noise emanating from the room is glorious but intense: a mixture of toddler hoots, theremin wails, synthetiser bleeps, keyboard drones, tambourine rattles, and background free jazz. Imagine being trapped in Café Oto with the creche from Jonestown.

All of South Glasgow hipster parentdom appears to be here in microcosm. Little children with curly locks in hand-knitted cardigans swim round my ankles. My charge has headed off to a corner painted yellow, where he gleefully whacks a large metallic silver ball before going over to a friend and attempting to lovingly pull off her face. Intervention is needed. They are too young to partake in the interactive cut-up poem on one wall – like a big section of fridge-door – but it is covered in various Dadaish flights of fancy and non-sequiturs composed from the moveable word-strips: 'tomorrow a voice that only we build/ in the journey/ we are in harmony/ it is a melody of/ worlds/ love/ immortality/ stars/ light/ song/ horizon'. I think an adult wrote that. Nearby is a little word-cloud: 'be wait find are your while am when how those you why equation'. Now that reads like true toddler collage poetry.

Ironic commentaries aside, Offeh’s show is a gloriously daft, fun, and anarchic spectacle, blending music, soft play, and video-art with anti-authoritarian pedagogy. It’s his latest exhibition using the out-there aesthetics of Afro-Futurism to furnish environments where children can explore alternative forms of socialisation, creative experience, and self-realisation. The literature for an earlier iteration of Mothership 2:0, staged at Baltic, Gateshead in 2025, speaks of 'activities and materials inspired by sci-fi, possible futures, and imagined utopian places. Different zones explore different sensory experiences. Experiment with weight and mass in the habitat zone, identity and performance on the yellow stage, make patterns with sound, and prophecies and predictions for the future with text.'

The Mothership Collective 2:0. Photo by Tiu Makkonen

Sun Ra is evidently a lodestar for Offeh. The Alabama-born jazz musician and experimentalist developed a New Age philosophy blending elements of Kabbalah, science fiction, Egyptology, and more which was germinal to the emergence of Afro-Futurism in the 1950s. Sun Ra styled himself as an extra-terrestrial being, returning to Earth to save humanity – in particular Black culture – from mental and spiritual drudgery. His influence can be found in the music and visuals of George Clinton’s psychedelic funk bands of the 1960s and 70s, Parliament and Funkadelic. 

Trained at Brighton and the RCA, Offeh recently completed a PhD involving “the activation of Black album covers by durational performance.” Album art-inspired world-building is evident all around us at Tramway. The whole room has the feel of a retro-futurist spaceship interior, reminiscent of Clinton’s 20-foot stage prop The P-Funk Mothership, which featured on the cover of Parliament’s 1975 album The Mothership Connection.

If I have one tiny quibble, I’m left feeling that, whereas I might have been able to read all this into Offeh’s magnificent creation, for the younglings present, this was just a good time. Are we kidding ourselves that our children are experimenting with identity and prophecy when they are just charging about – and, in my case, trying to eat and steal various bits of the artworks? I’m left pondering this, but with a big grin on my face, as we head home.

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The Mothership Collective 2:0, Tramway, Glasgow, until 7 Feb 2027