SAMUEL BAAH KORTEY
“Na Who Give Up Messop” by Samuel Baah Kortey
Artist in collaboration with TAAH, The African Art Hub
STATEMENT
Samuel Baah Kortey’s artistic practice archives and explores the physical, metaphysical and
social interactions of societies with notions that relate to civilization, immigration, religion, and the sacred. He is intrigued by religious subjectivities, the structural framework of cities & ideas concerning animal and human sacrifices. As a multi-sensorial art practitioner, his mediums vary.
He uses diverse materials such as animal & human blood, coffee, paper, resin, and sound to create provocative installations that may be perceived as sinful. Still, in actual sense, his work critically engages with cultural and religious practices within specific contexts. He critically scrutinizes conceptions around valorizing religious and cultural iconographies within the post colonial space. A recurring motif in Samuel’s approach is his use of animal blood, which he relates to the daily happenings at the abattoir, social rooms, and various churches worldwide.
His performances and installations question these notions of love, violence, sacrifice, sacred, secular, death, and life…; to subvert these blessed or religious (Christian) traditions centered on man to that which advocates compassion towards animals. By subverting and creating parodies of Christian iconographies, he probes into the lost aura of the Christ iconography, as it is met with massification by capitalist and hyper-consumerist popular culture, which turns the
sacred into something banal and memes.
ART SHOP
Samuel Baah Kortey
b. 1994 in Asesewa - Ghana
BIOGRAPHY
Samuel Baah Kortey (b. 1994 Asesewa, Ghana) is a multi-sensory artist, thinker, and visual researcher from Ghana. His source materials start with historical archives, daily happenings, and moments referencing death, decay, and struggles, which carefully materialize into objects or thought-provoking adventures. As an observationist, Samuel investigates and highlights post-colonial traces in the ways of life of modern societies through documentation of daily happenings, recordings, and accessing the street visual culture of cities.
Samuel has a BFA and MFA from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (2013-2022) in Kumasi-Ghana. In early 2023, he graduated Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Fine Art (Klasse de Willem de Rooij), Frankfurt, Germany.
His installations have explored, archived, and examined the hyper-visible expressions that characterize cities, particularly in Kumasi, where he lives and works. The artist is a member of three collectives, blaxTARLINES, Commune6x3, and a co-founder of the Asafo Black Collective. He has shown in the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennial and the 2022 Documenta 15 with his collectives Asafo Black and blaxTARLINES Kumasi collective, respectively. He is a current Villa Romana fellow in Florence, Italy.