The daughter of an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, Senam Okudzeto grew up in Ghana, Nigeria and the UK. She holds a BFA from the Slade School of University College London, a Masters degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. In 2000 she was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and in 2003/4 she was a research fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she held a solo show titled Ghana Must Go. The same title describes a larger body of work and a set of theoretical concerns which form the basis of the book Okudzeto is currently researching on material culture and commodity fetishism.

Okudzeto recently exhibited at the 2006 Dakar biennale. Group exhibitions include the Paris showing of Africa Remix (2005); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the New Museum, New York (2003); Fiction or Reality at the Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland (2003); and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001).

Her practice ranges from the overtly political to the quiet and painterly, but politics are never entirely absent. Her large-scale nudes unapologetically address sexuality and visibility. The paintings in Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance are drawn from two bodies of work, Ghana Must Go and All facts have been changed to protect the ignorant, the latter appearing here in the form of a wall drawing/installation which was produced in situ. Okudzeto touches on these works, and notions of ‘relative distance’, in the following interview with Courtney J Martin conducted in May 2006:

What was the impetus for the scale of this work?

These large works are unusual for my practice, as they stand alone. Recently, I have worked on multimedia installations incorporating video, text, sculpture and painting into a single work. The two nudes began as studies for a larger installation work of figures dripping into each other, which would have been made of several smaller works. But there are rare times when concept fades and I simply get carried away with the execution of a work.

Regardless of medium, so much of your work has a painterly quality. What painting traditions are you drawing from?

My formal training was in painting. I received an undergraduate degree at the Slade and a Masters at the Royal College of Art. If you ask me who my favourite painter is, I may have to answer Poussin. There is a conservative streak in me that thinks painting is the only grounding for a career in visual culture, but at the same time people overly trained in painting can make the worst painters. I can only allow myself to paint for pleasure, whereas my conceptual pieces can be thrashed about for years on end and worked to death. They are more robust, but the paintings must always remain fresh. So, my struggle is always to remain a painter, but to produce as few paintings as possible. When this method works, the paintings always have a life of their own; they vibrate. The medium I use is very honest and will not allow you to lie about your mood – it transfers it directly to the paper. So it’s best to remain enraptured and entranced when making the large works – a difficult state to maintain, hence their rarity.

You have lived in Basel, London, New York, Accra, Lagos and Paris. What relationship do these different geographic locations have with your work? Does your movement from place to place affect your process?

All of my work is commentary on time and space, in particular the idea of the experience of traversing geographical space and the understanding of geographical space as experiential. A journey constitutes an encounter with events, and through this logic, something as simple as a biographical anecdote can constitute a form of mapmaking. So, these large works are not merely studies of the body. They are the early stages of cartographic code under construction. The body moves through space like calligraphic script, writing its own history.

My works also constitute biography, and all comment directly, or indirectly, on my love of displacement and multiple identities. I keep a studio in Basel, live in London, research in Ghana, and spend a great deal of time travelling to other places. I am constantly confronted with the idea that my itinerancy dilutes my Africanness, and yet, in my experience, my itinerancy underlines my Africanness. I spent my formative years based in West Africa, but traversing the globe with my family. This is my African experience. It is frustrating that people feel so comfortable with essentialising African identity, believing in a purely static, authentic African subject that must always inhabit the margins. If I were to describe myself as a ‘migrant worker’, it would set a tone that is easily accepted, but the more honest truth is that I am a boarding school brat who like to travel. Not so romantic, but still authentically African. However, this identity itself is not so straightforward, and also encodes 15 years of exile as a political refugee and the experiences of social vicissitude that forced displacements incur.

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