Samuel Baah Kortey

Samuel Baah Kortey is a multi-sensory artist and thinker from Kumasi, Ghana. Samuel started paying attention to his immediate environment and highlighting post-colonial traces in the ways of life of modern societies during his art school days in Kumasi, Ghana. Samuel has a BFA and MFA from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (2013-2022). Samuel’s installations have explored 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. Samuel is a current fellow and resident of the Villa Romana Prize, Florence-Italy.

Artist Statement

Samuel Baah Kortey’s artistic practice engages and explores societies' physical, metaphysical, and social interactions with notions related to religion and the sacred. He is intrigued by religious subjectivities and notions concerning animal and human sacrifices. He uses diverse materials such as animal and human blood, wood, paper, coffee, and resin to create provocative installations that may be perceived as sacrilegious. Still, in the true sense, his work rather critically engages with religious practices within specific cultural contexts, and critically scrutinizes conceptions around the valorization of religious and cultural iconographies within the post-colonial space. A recurring motif in Samuel’s practice is his use of animal blood and coffee which he relates to the daily happenings at the abattoir, social spaces, and various churches across the world. He questions these notions of love, violence, sacrifice, sacred, secular, death, and life...; to subvert these sacred or religious (Christian) traditions centered on humans, to that which advocates compassion towards animals. By subverting and creating parodies of Christian iconographies, Baah probes into the lost aura of the Christ iconography, as it is met with massification by capitalist and hyper-consumerist popular culture, which turns sacred into something banal.