Adjoa Armah

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. 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. 

She 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. 

Her practice-led DPhil research in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, cross-supervised with Pitt Rivers Museum, is 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.

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.