Senam Okudzeto

		Senam Okudzeto
		Senam Okudzeto’s work is, in her own words, “random elements drawn together to rewrite the globe; identity, identification, language, the map, absurdity and itinerancy.” Primarily a painter but working in a wide variety of media, the artist grew up in Ghana and Nigeria, studied in the UK, and has spent longer periods of time in Continental Europe and the United States. The works in this exhibition are fragments of the Ghana Must Go project — a body of work incorporating painting, written texts, film video and installation begun two years ago and recently shown at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

The images and objects incorporate experiences of Ghanaians around the globe as well as Okudzeto’s personal biography: The inexpensive plaid woven bags, known in Nigerian pidgin as “Ghana must go”, refer to the makeshift “luggage” used by approximately 2.5 million Ghanaians and other foreigners when they were forcibly deported within two weeks from Nigeria in 1983 (a retaliation for a similar expulsion from Ghana in the 1960s); an event that affected Okudzeto’s childhood and that she represents with the bags as sculptural installations featuring collages of personal photographs that meld images from various times and locations in her life. The disembodied hands and forearms in Okudzeto’s “Disarmament Series” (2001-3) are a type of sign language, while the large nudes refer to the body as landscape. Okudzeto’s work strives to argue that national identities are as much constructed outside of nations as they are within.

Born in 1972, Okudzeto received her bachelor's degree from the Slade School of Fine Art, London University College, her master's from the Royal College of Art in London, and pursued postgraduate study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. She was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000-2001 and at the Stiftung Laurenz Haus in Basel, Switzerland, in 2002, and recently completed a 2003-4 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has taught and lectured at Loyola University, Occidental College and the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Switzerland. She has also received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award in 2002. Okudzeto recently relocated to Basel, Switzerland

(The artist was part of the Women artists from Africa exhibition series No.4 in 2004 but is not represented as artist of the Gallery).