Samuel Baah Kortey

Villa Romana Fellow 2023

Ghana

Samuel Baah Kortey 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 materialise into objects or thought-provoking adventures. As an observationist, Samuel investigates and highlights post-colonial traces of modern societies' ways of life through documentation of the mundane, recordings, and access to 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 from 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 and 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 was one of the fellows in residence for the Villa Romana Prize 2023 in Florence.