• YAA ASANTEWAA ART PRIZE 2023
     

    YAA ASANTEWAA ART PRIZE 2023

    AN ART PRIZE FOR WOMEN ARTISTS from GHANA and its diasporA.

  • Gallery 1957 is congratulates Lois Arde-Acquach who emerged as first place, Nuotama Frances Bodomo as first runner-up and Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah second runner-up.

    Named after the prominent Ghanaian Queen Mother, the prize aims to fortify Gallery 1957's commitment to supporting and uplifting emerging and established artists across Ghana and the diaspora. The prize is open exclusively to Ghanaian women artists either living in Ghana or across its diaspora. In the future, we look forward to expanding the prize to include all African and African diaspora identifying artists.  
  • The winner will have an artist residency and exhibition at Gallery 1957 and has been selected by a jury of...

    The winner will have an artist residency and exhibition at Gallery 1957 and has been selected by a jury of international experts:
    Erin Christovale, Film programmer and curator at the Hammer Museum; Ekow Eshun, Writer and curator; N’Goné Fall, Independent curator and cultural policy consultant; Katherine Finerty, Curator, Art Historian and Writer; Ibrahim Mahama, Artist, Founder of the SCCA, Nkrumah Volini and Red Clay; Azu Nwagbogu, Curator, and Founder and director of African Artists' Foundation.

  • Marwan Zakhem, Founder of Gallery 1957:

    'Listening and working closely with our local community, we have identified a need to support particularly women artists in Ghana. In creating The Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize, we hope to offer a way in which to address the lack of existing support for women and women identifying artists in the country, and its diaspora. Beyond the financial support, the goal is to give participating shortlisted artists a platform for their work, and exposure worldwide.'

  • 2023 Winners

  • Lois Arde-Acquah , Prize recipient
     

    Lois Arde-Acquah

    Prize recipient
    Lois Arde - Acquah (b. 1992) is a Ghanaian artist living and working in Ghana. She creates hand drawings of her intricate monochrome patterns on various surfaces such as paper, canvas, etc. to explore seemingly repetitive activities. Her initial process of hand drawings with black markers has evolved into cutting out these patterns from black synthetic leathers.
     
    She uses her body as a medium to express and represent this idea of seemingly repetitive activities. The monotonous tendency of her work begins with a pseudo-cyclical action which manifests in a process of cutting out the patterns from synthetic leather, paper, canvas, and plastic sheets. A process embedded in the particular enquiry of mentally and emotionally draining activities of everyday life - one that demands a painstaking dedication of creating and re-creating oneself. Her process is an interest into what is considered difficult, hard, almost impossible to achieve, tiresome and leads to boredom.
  • Nuotama Frances Bodomo, First Runner up

    Nuotama Frances Bodomo

    First Runner up
    Nuotama Frances Bodomo (b. 1988 Accra, Ghana) is a Dagao filmmaker based in Tamale. She studied film at Columbia University (BA) and NYU Tisch (MFA). Her shorts Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Everybody Dies! (2016) won best experimental short at BlackStar. Afronauts has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum’s Dreamlands, the 2018 Venice Biennale’s Dimensions of Citizenship, & the 2015 Lubumbashi Biennale. She directed on Random Acts of Flyness (HBO) and co-founded the New Negress Film Society.

    Nuotama returned to Ghana in 2019 and has since been focused on her studio practice, Mothertongue, through which she explores the mass relevance of afro-indigenous knowledge systems. She is in progress on the video lectures “Unbraiding Three-Act-Structure” (presented at Nubuke’s Woori 2022), “A Feminine Gaze” (presented at Nuku Studio Tamale in 2023), and "Beyond the Colonial Camera” (the keynote of BlackStar's inaugural 2021 Filmmaker Seminar). She is in post-production on In Search of Yennenga, a docu-hybrid film that confronts the forgotten history of Northern Ghana’s warrior
    princess.
  • Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, Second Runner up

    Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

    Second Runner up
    Akosua (pronounced ‘A-koss-ya) Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (b.1990, Bonn) is a German-Ghanaian artist based in Zurich, Switzerland who studied Fine Arts at the HBK Saar in Germany from 2009 to 2015. She engages with the expansive territories of photography, exploring the convergence of materiality and emotion. Through iterative and process-oriented methods, she creates work that examines familial bonds, personal loss, identity, and institutional aspects of both environment and society.


    In her practice, which is both research-driven and shaped by autobiographical matters, she unites analog techniques with contemporary technologies, crafting intricate narratives that both challenge and liberate traditional concepts of identity and belonging. Her home is the color darkroom, where manual processes meet digital experimentation, offering nuanced perspectives on the tangible and intangible elements of the human experience. In Adu-Sanyah’s work, personal, institutional, analog, and digital realms find interconnected expression, reflecting a continuous exploration and understanding of the multifaceted dynamics that shape our lives.

  • PRESS