two years ago (2002) and recently shown (2004) at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

The images and objects  incorporate experiences of Ghanaians around the globe as well as Okudzeto’s personal biography: The inexpensive plaid woven bags, known in Nigerian pidgin as Ghana must go, refer to the makeshift luggage used by approximately 2.5 million Ghanaians and other foreigners when they were forcibly deported within two weeks from Nigeria in 1983 (a retaliation for a similar expulsion from Ghana in the 1960s); an event that affected Okudzeto's childhood and that she represents with the bags as sculptural installations featuring collages of personal photographs that meld images from various times and locations in her life. The disembodied hands and forearms in Okudzeto’s Disarmament Series (2001-2003) are a type of sign language, while the large nudes refer to the body as landscape. Okudzeto's work strives to argue that national identities are as much constructed outside of nations as they are within.

Born in 1972, Okudzeto received her bachelor's degree from the Slade School of Fine Art, London University College, her master's from the Royal College of Art in London, and pursued postgraduate study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. She was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000-2001 and at the Stiftung Laurenz Haus in Basel, Switzerland, in 2002, and recently completed a 2003-4 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has taught and lectured at Loyola University, Occidental College and the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Switzerland.  She has also received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award in 2002.

Senam Okudzeto