Senam Okudzeto

Senam Okudzeto

Edith Bloom/Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize
September 7, 2015–July 29, 2016
Profession
Artist, New York
Lecturer, Kunsthistorisches Seminar, University of Basel
Project title
Afro-Dada Glossolalia
Project description

What do African art and Dada have in common? Can these two seemingly distant points in culture be brought together? Afro-Dada-Glossolalia recalls the early influence of African artifacts on Dada and Surrealism and aims to reinscribe the presence of African visual cultures into the network relations of Dada, Surrealism, and modernist industrial culture. The use of Rome as the site for investigation revisits the Rome Dada season staged by Julius Evola in 1921 and the film L’Age D’or by Luis Buñuel, where a cacophony of absurd object relations are framed through the laying of cornerstones of a future Rome. The word glossolalia is here used to articulate a methodological intent, a so-called speaking in tongues that seeks to channel, or perhaps translate, the drives of Dada and Surrealism in order to create a range of new critical and creative departure points, capable of resonating across time, place, and aesthetic traditions.This project will be realized through video, installation, painting, and sculpture. Recalling the mechanical passions of the Futurists and their brief flirtation with Dada, I intend to create an elucidatory assemblage of objects and artifacts, inspired in part by iconic Italian modernist industrial design and the very corpus of the city of Rome itself.