Sarah Ama Duah reflects on the origins and development of her practice

We speak to Berlin-based artist and 2024 Creative Bursary recipient, Sarah Ama Duah, about creating work in the fertile space where sculpture, dress, and performance meet.

TSAF: Can you tell us how your practice first started out, what spurred you to create your earliest works?

Sarah: I remember a dramatic dress and headpiece made of broken pieces of mirror, which I created at 16. Looking back on it now, I think I was drawn to the transformative power of clothing. During my fashion studies at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences it became even more fascinating to me to explore these familiar and accessible, yet endlessly adaptable, everyday objects by constructing, deconstructing, and reinventing them.

How has your practice changed over time? Has sculpture, dress, performance - and the spaces in which they meet and mingle - always been the focus of your interest?

Coming from dressmaking, the human body—its proportions, possibilities, and limits—have always been central to my practice and still inform my practice today. Over time, I moved from working solely with other bodies to incorporating my own, whether through casting or performance. This process and a growing interest in narrative building opened up further exploration of mediums.

My practice is rooted in craft, the need to express and the search for an artistic language that allows me to explore new ways of “how to say something” or “how to say the same thing in multiple ways and gestures”, “how to tell a story or one’s own”. At the moment I’ve been drawn to the novel as a medium—the way narratives unfold, characters emerge and atmospheres take shape. —exploring how these possibilities can be tools for narration within my sculptural practice.

What do these mediums and formats offer to you as an artist seeking to build narratives?

Casting and modeling allow me to build narratives through a slow, deliberate process where time becomes an integral element. Casting offers a way to reflect, reshape, and recreate both objects and stories.

Can you explain how your work seeks to explore and highlight Afro-diasporic histories? 

My exploration takes different turns—may it be by examining Germany’s migration history, embedding Black knowledge into my installations or centering Black female bodies.

In the ongoing series “To build to bury to remember”, I examine and deconstruct colonial monuments, while developing hybrid forms between sculpture and my own body. I adopt a sculptural approach to the topic, inviting performers to reflect on the fetishized status of historical monuments by shaping our bodies into alternative, temporary monuments using latex. Together we physically reflect on questions like:

What different forms can sculptural appreciation take? To whom do we want to dedicate them and what do we actually dedicate? How do we deal with the empty space that remains when colonial monuments are torn down?

Can you speak a little about the importance of preserving and exploring Afro-diasporic histories and narratives on a global scale, as well as in the context of someone living and creating work in Germany or Western Europe?

As an Afro-German woman born and raised in Germany, I confront and reflect on what I was taught—or not taught—about blackness, about people who look like me, about Afro-diasporic narratives. While my perspective is shaped by the experience of being an Afro-German woman, it extends beyond the personal. It connects to broader histories of migration, politics, economics, and relationships, emphasizing that these stories are collective, intertwined, and deeply relevant to our present. It’s essential that we tell our own stories to challenge historical erasure and misrepresentation. This also means that there is not only one story, but rather a vast variety. It’s about creating a space for future generations to learn, disagree, and root themselves in.

Discrepancy is a word you use in describing your work - can you unpick that a bit? Is this about looking at contrasts or mismatches between history and how history is depicted, or discussed today?

When I use the word discrepancy I refer to the indifference between grand historical narrations and actual lived experience. The exhibition Echoes of the Brother Countries at HKW is a good example of what I mean. During DDR the State was propagating an image of solidarity and Völkerfreundschaft (‘friendship between peoples’), by highlighting the stories of migrant labour the picture becomes a different one: one of unpaid labour, regulations of bodies, false promises. The exhibition is contextualising this chapter of German history with comprehensive eyewitness accounts and discourse programs. I took part with a sculptural contribution. I wanted to create an ode to the women whose bodies were under regulation within the context of DDR migrant labour.

How would you like the current art world and establishments to change in order to become more open to amplifying a breadth of narratives and topics? 

I ask myself: what do I want to share artistically? What do I want to express and how, rather than asking who is going to listen, institution-wise. When I am in the studio, I focus on artistic reflections I want to share with the world. It’s not easy to make a living from art, so I work in jobs outside the art field to sustain my living costs and finance my practice. This also gives me the freedom to find my artistic language, irrespective of what the industry or establishments are demanding or willing to exhibit. Real interest is great and getting opportunities to show the work to a wider audience is much appreciated, but it’s not only about visibility. It is also about facilitating an artistic position, mutual respect and openness to critique. A lot of my thoughts around these questions became more specific after listening to, and being in conversation with, my dear friend Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin who inspired me toward a deeper level of introspection.

Tell us what you are working on at the moment. And what’s coming up next that you’re excited about? 

At the moment I’m super excited about working with beeswax. Within the installation I am weaving together autobiographical links, and fictional and historical elements. As part of my artistic research I’m looking into Cheikh Anta Diop’s body of work as well as referring to the personal belongings of some of my family members. Throughout the process we created casts of parts of my body which have sort of turned into artefacts within the installation.

Check out more of Sarah's work here.