Ama BE

Presentation

As a Ghanaian-American transdisciplinary artist, Ama BE’s artistic practice focuses on the exploration of matter, cultivating contrasting relationships with hegemonic commerce, spirituality and holistic healing practices. She works primarily with plant materials such as tobacco, sugar cane, oil palm and cotton (lace) in ritual performances, but also with screens and digital technology to explore the ways in which we embody our associations through these media. She explores the permeable spaces between time, materiality, sensibility and memory to enact contemporary incarnations of these material histories and nuance value structures. In her practice, she questions the effects of commodification on these bodies by tracing their formal lineage to redefine their contemporary function. Superimposition is a recurring means by that she expresses the permeability between matter and the archives of memory. Her multi-layered soundscapes, her simple and repetitive gestures, the cumulative layers of material directly on her body in her performances and video works open up propositional and suggestive spaces within material encounters. Her practice is about translating the enigma of memory and labor into a syntax rooted in metric and algorithmic principles. Blurring the definitions of place, presence and embodiment, her work plays with ideas of temporal collapse to develop conceptual frameworks for African « futuristic » performance art. source : https://biennaledakar.org/2024/03/04/ama-be-ghana-etats-unis/