AnTC – Adjoa Armah & Omonblanks

‘Who will remain on the beach asking how, how, how?‘

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities we carry within our bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates the intersections of grief, cultural memory, and resilience, particularly as they emerge within diasporic and post-colonial contexts.

Armah is concerned with how identity is metabolised generationally – how grief, joy, and survival are transformed and reconstituted in response to shifting cultural conditions. By tracing the changing values ascribed to objects and materials, she considers how certain regimes of value inscribe power, meaning, and belonging onto specific forms. She explores how memory and trauma permeate and recompose themselves in the spaces we inhabit. Through a multidisciplinary approach, her work interrogates archival and interpersonal silences, staging narrative spaces able to hold what is lost and what is remembered. 

She is the founder of Saman Archive, a gathering of photographic negatives encountered across Ghana, through which she explores models of institution building grounded in Akan temporalities and West African technologies of social and historical mediation. Armah has shown internationally, including at Auto Italia, London, fluent, Santander, Hauser & Wirth, Menorca, Delfina Foundation, London, Espace Niemeyer, Paris, and Salone De Mobile, Milan. Armah is also currently a practice-led DPhil researcher in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, cross-supervised with Pitt Rivers Museum, with a project provisionally titled; ‘Atlantic Marginalia: Towards Black Historiography with the Temporal Consciousness of Sand’. Through her doctoral research, she engages with concepts of unstable ground, considering sand, soil, sea, and various mutable landscapes as metaphors for identity: shifting, porous and constantly reshaped by external factors.

In this presentation and performance lecture, Armah charts the last decade of her practice, presenting an entanglement of shifting artistic, intellectual, institutional, and personal concerns. With the primary commitments of her practice shifting over the last year, Armah invites the audience on a journey to seek out the seeds of her current commitments in earlier work.
The performance lecture is supported by a small audio-visual installation and the ensuing conversation will be moderated by Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin.