Boogie Wall Gallery is pleased to present “Reembodying the Real” by British artist Adelaide Damoah. This exhibition will be exclusively online and begin with a VIP preview, on May 7 2020, accessible by invitation only. Then continues until July 7 2020 

“Reembodying the Real” includes previously unseen works from the artist’s GENESIS series, which 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” 2019. “Into the Mind of the Coloniser” was first performed in 2019 with Open Space Contemporary and subsequently performed in Oslo (2019) and New York (2020). 

The series was sparked by the discovery of a photo of Damoah’s 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 this series of work. The same image sparked a desire to discover more about the history of colonialism and the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser. 

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. 

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 artist has cited David Hammons and Ana Mendieta as key influences in the production of this work.