Adama Delphine Fawundu
For this exhibit:
A curator is a storyteller, weaving a narrative from the artwork of an artist. Given the opportunity to curate two solo exhibits in the same art space is a curators dream. The Rhizome Remains and Tingoi were held at Granary Art in Ephraim, Utah, February 12 - May 2, 2020. As fortune would have it the Granary had asked if I knew of another artist whose work related thematically, to be shown simultaneously with Kari Laine. Immediately I saw a strong correlation to the multi-media work of Brooklyn-based artist, Adama Delphine Fawundu, who I’d first met when she released, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, co-edited with Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. We’d celebrated this groundbreaking work at Photoville in 2018. And, I’d attended a panel and site specific dance during the exhibition of Delphine’s work, The Sacred Star of Isis, in New York in 2019.
West African deities shape-shift, defy time and elude human form. Embodied through art forms including dance, music, painting and sculpture their powers are transmitted by stories. As the only child in her immediate family born in America, Fawundu’s connection to Sierra Leone is through stories told by her parents. Her Mende father and Krio mother were raised Catholic in the British colony, Sierra Leone.
In their stories of everyday life, she heard mystical stories of medicine men, Bondo Nomoli’s (masked beings), and Mami Wata – an omnipotent yet elusive water goddess. Fawundu’s memories inform her latest work where she manifests conversations between multiple African deities and the forceful extraction of her people due to slavery. These photo-based multi-media works honor the Mende river goddess, Tingoi, the quintessence of beauty. Tingoi expands human imagination to hold all the beauty the world contains. Fawundu understands deities travel through space and time to inhabit a true world beyond human access. She creates various iterations of these beings as they interfere, intersect and confront current and past social and cultural realities. Natural elements including hair, textiles and cowrie shells are integral and powerful conduits in her work. Masks, a form of self-preservation throughout the violent histories of Colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, are prevalent in her practice. Fawundu unfolds the layers of the stories she knows to create new ones. She reimagines, reenacts and recreates Afro futurist identities representing a new narrative, and honoring the complex history of the African Diaspora.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her art explores the strength of African and Black diaspora culture and identities that continue to evolve despite the social violence of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Fawundu is a co-founder and author of the book and movement, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is currently an artist-in-resident at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Her awards include the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Grant, and the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant. Fawundu’s works can be found in private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and David C. Driskell Center, For the Study of Visual Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland.
Reading list as an exploration to accompany Tingoi (downloadable PDF)
Installation Video