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Adelaide Damoah ©Photo, artist's courtesy
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 IS THE RESULT OF THE DISCOVERY OF HER GREAT GRANDMOTHER PHOTOGRAPHY,
AMA AMMISSAH QUANSAH, DATING BACK TO 1920 IN BRITISH GOLD COAST (NOW GHANA.
THOSE RESULTING TO A DESIRE TO DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF COLONIALISM
AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE COLONISED AND THE COLONISER.
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INSTALLATION VIEW
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BIBLE PAGES
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THE BIBLE PAGE WORKS IN THE SERIES PROMPTED THE ARTIST TO START TO CONSIDER THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND COLONIALISM.
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"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)."
- Adelaide Damoah
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 from the colonial era of her family.
This is when 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.
She began by using various image transfer techniques on body prints and combining it with text, with no certainty as to where the use of the image would lead in works such as Great Angel Mother, 2016 and Great Angel Golden Mother, 2016 and progressed to You Should Learn to Speak the Language, 2017 and My Dad thinks I am Honest, 2017 and most recently The Rebirth of Ama, 2018. 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. Damoah works at the intersection of painting and performance within the context of colonialism, identity, feminism and spirituality.
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LARGE WORKS
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THE ARTIST AND THE PERFORMANCE
Of her current performance work, Damoah says:
"I am interested in generating a spontaneous communi(cati)on between myself and an audience using a performance in which I function as a channel by which a recorded history of what was previously known but became unknown in the past becomes uncannily known again in the present, only to become unknown again at the end of the performance."
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Damoah’s performances are products of organic processes which depend not only on the different modes of sensory perception of her body of unambiguous (i.e. explicit and literal) and ambiguous (i.e. implicit and metaphorical) processes and events taking place in their multi-sensory perceptions of the sensory world; but also on the individual (mental and bodily sensory) and collective (cultural) memory-images she derives from both these different modes of perception and their diasporic experiences.
The processes of production of such mythopoetic artwork may be conceived in terms of life-cycles in which the ancestral life that was previously unknown - and therefore alien become known in the artwork, only to become partially/totally replaced by another life which was previously unknown. Damoah uses her work to explore the unstable boundary distinctions between the human 'subjective self' and the non human 'objective other' materials of nature with which she conjointly produces these artworks.
A viewer of her performances may experience both an enhanced/impaired distinction between his/her self' and the profane/sacred 'other' life(s) in a (sub)liminal 'zone' of perception that was previously forbidden to him/her; and encourages the viewer to attribute mysterious, enigmatic and unfixed meanings to the ancestral/new life.
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Online Exhibitions
