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The subject matter in Ukpong's performance intervention deals with exploring and testing the role of objects and the body as mediated social agency as understood through the concepts of object-oriented philosophy, new materialism, and African sensibility towards ritual objects. In testing the scope as an artist-researcher through a series of public interventions, Ukpong's mediated objects/bodies are forced to collide with the everyday urban or rural environments while contrasting different forms of power and authority.  These interventions are shaped by socio-ecological and exploitative economics and culture disrupted by the difficult-to-read presence of Ukpong's symbolic rituals that demand a visceral and emphatic response to the representations of the black ecologies through visual metaphors and fantasies.

Performance “The Return of the Object” at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa (c 2017)

Performance “EARTH-SOUNDS” Niger-Delta Nigeria, a commisioned work by Autograph-ABP London, United Kingdom (c 2021)

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