About

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities we carry within our bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates the intersections of grief, cultural memory, and resilience, particularly as they emerge within diasporic and post-colonial contexts.

Armah is concerned with how identity is metabolised generationally - how grief, joy, and survival are transformed and reconstituted in response to shifting cultural conditions. By tracing the changing values ascribed to objects and materials, she considers how certain regimes of value inscribe power, meaning, and belonging onto specific forms. She explores how memory and trauma permeate and recompose themselves in the spaces we inhabit. Through a multidisciplinary approach, her work interrogates archival and interpersonal silences, staging narrative spaces able to hold what is lost and what is remembered. 

She is the founder of saman archive, a gathering of photographic negatives encountered across Ghana, through which she explores models of institution building grounded in Akan temporalities and West African technologies of social and historical mediation. Armah has shown internationally, including at Auto Italia, London, fluent, Santander, Hauser & Wirth, Menorca, Delfina Foundation, London, Espace Niemeyer, Paris, and Salone De Mobile, Milan. Armah is also currently a practice-led DPhil researcher in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, cross-supervised with Pitt Rivers Museum, with a project provisionally titled; ‘Atlantic Marginalia: Towards Black Historiography with the Temporal Consciousness of Sand'. Through her doctoral research, she engages with concepts of unstable ground, considering sand, soil, sea, and various mutable landscapes as metaphors for identity: shifting, porous and constantly reshaped by external factors. Armah holds a Master’s in Material Anthropology and Design from University College London.

Armah has been published widely, including in Afterall, e-flux, Frieze, A Magazine Curated by, Apartamento, Vogue and TSA Art Magazine, with her writing also appearing in publications by Pace Gallery, Ed Cross Gallery, Pilar Corrias and iniva (Institute of International Visual Art). She has lectured widely and has taught, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, across art, curating, design, spatial practices, and writing programmes at institutions including Tate Modern, Ruskin School of Art, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, New York University, Swiss Institute, University of Westminster, Royal College of Art, Architectural Association, and HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design. Armah holds a Master’s in Material Anthropology and Design from University College London. Her work has been supported by Magnum Foundation, Graham Foundation, Arts Council England, Mellon Foundation, and British Council, amongst others.