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REEMBODYING THE REAL
Damoah works at the intersection of painting and performance within the context of colonialism, identity, feminism and spirituality.
"Reembodying the Real" includes previously unseen works from Adelaide Damoah’s 2018 GENESIS series.
The works in Genesis mark the beginning of t... more >> Boogie-Wall Gallery is thrilled to present the solo exhibition of British Ghanaian artist Adelaide Damoah in collaboration with MTArt Agency.
Damoah works at the intersection of painting and performance within the context of colonialism, identity, feminism and spirituality.
"Reembodying the Real" includes previously unseen works from Adelaide Damoah’s 2018 GENESIS series.
The works in Genesis mark the beginning of the artist's exploration into her personal history.
The series was sparked by the discovery of a photo of her great grandmother, Ama Ammissah Quansah, dating back to 1920 in British Gold Coast (now Ghana).
The discovery led to an obsession with the image and Damoah has used it multiple times in various works including “The Rebirth of Ama” (2018) which is featured in the current exhibition. The same image sparked a desire to discover more about the history of colonialism and the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser.
The bible page works in the series prompted the artist to start to consider the relationship between Christianity, spirituality and colonialism.
Of the body print works in the series, the artist said,“Black and gold have been used both for aesthetic and metaphorical reasons.
Black is evoking skin colour, but also absence as a lived experience.
Meanwhile,gold is referring to Ghana's historical source of wealth which gave it its colonial name (Gold Coast).
”The Genesis works ultimately led to the development of the artist’s ongoing project Confronting Colonisation, the first iteration of which being her performance, “Into the Mind of the Coloniser”, initially performed in 2019 with Open Space Contemporary and subsequently in Oslo (2019) and New York (2020).
Works in the series are importantly titled after Ghanaian proverbs with the translation of the twi in English in order to further tie the work to the artist's heritage.
As a descendant of Ghanaian parents, Adelaide Damoah has always had a particular interest in colonial history and knew that eventually she would explore the relationship between Ghana and Britain in her work.
In 2016, she traveled to Ghana looking for old photographs of her family from the colonial era.
It was at this time that she found a very powerful image of her maternal great grandmother which was taken in 1920, when Ghana was the British Gold Coast.
It was then that she knew that this image would be the anchor to form the basis of her exploration.
