Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize 2023

Lois Arde - Acquah (b. 1992) is a Ghanaian artist living and working in Ghana. She creates hand drawings of her intricate monochrome patterns on various surfaces such as paper, canvas, etc. to explore seemingly repetitive activities. Her initial process of hand drawings with black markers has evolved into cutting out these patterns from black synthetic leathers.

 

She uses her body as a medium to express and represent this idea of seemingly repetitive activities. The monotonous tendency of her work begins with a pseudo-cyclical action which manifests in a process of cutting out the patterns from synthetic leather, paper, canvas, and plastic sheets. A process embedded in the particular enquiry of mentally and emotionally draining activities of everyday life - one that demands a painstaking dedication of creating and re-creating oneself. Her process is an interest into what is considered difficult, hard, almost impossible to achieve, tiresome and leads to boredom.

Nuotama Frances Bodomo (b. 1988 Accra, Ghana) is a Dagao filmmaker based in Tamale. She studied film at Columbia University (BA) and NYU Tisch (MFA). Her shorts Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Everybody Dies! (2016) won best experimental short at BlackStar. Afronauts has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum’s Dreamlands, the 2018 Venice Biennale’s Dimensions of Citizenship, & the 2015 Lubumbashi Biennale. She directed on Random Acts of Flyness (HBO) and co-founded the New Negress Film Society.

Nuotama returned to Ghana in 2019 and has since been focused on her studio practice, Mothertongue, through which she explores the mass relevance of afro-indigenous knowledge systems. She is in progress on the video lectures “Unbraiding Three-Act-Structure” (presented at Nubuke’s Woori 2022), “A Feminine Gaze” (presented at Nuku Studio Tamale in 2023), and "Beyond the Colonial Camera” (the keynote of BlackStar's inaugural 2021 Filmmaker Seminar). She is in post-production on In Search of Yennenga, a docu-hybrid film that confronts the forgotten history of Northern Ghana’s warrior
princess.

Akosua (pronounced ‘A-koss-ya) Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (b.1990, Bonn) is a German-Ghanaian artist based in Zurich, Switzerland who studied Fine Arts at the HBK Saar in Germany from 2009 to 2015. She engages with the expansive territories of photography, exploring the convergence of materiality and emotion. Through iterative and process-oriented methods, she creates work that examines familial bonds, personal loss, identity, and institutional aspects of both environment and society.

In her practice, which is both research-driven and shaped by autobiographical matters, she unites analog techniques with contemporary technologies, crafting intricate narratives that both challenge and liberate traditional concepts of identity and belonging. Her home is the color darkroom, where manual processes meet digital experimentation, offering nuanced perspectives on the tangible and intangible elements of the human experience. In Adu-Sanyah’s work, personal, institutional, analog, and digital realms find interconnected expression, reflecting a continuous exploration and understanding of the multifaceted dynamics that shape our lives.