Changing Ideas Award
"When Akuaba met Madonna" is from The Akan Series, my research-based art series that explores the cultural philosophies of the Akan people, a diverse meta-ethnic group in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. This piece investigates artistic production within wider contexts of decoloniality, religion, and cultural valuation.
Akuaba was a ritual fertility doll associated with Akan tribes such as the Fante. Together with other Akan artistic forms, it was deeply intertwined with native spirituality. This relationship between art and belief is not unique, as across societies, art often functions as a medium for religious and spiritual engagement. However, the expansion of Christianity in West Africa, from the fifteenth century, was associated with the demonisation of native spiritualities and with this, the suppression and marginalisation of art and artefacts that were closely associated with them. These colonial ideologies persist today through ongoing cultural discrimination. Within some Ghanaian Christian communities, Akuaba and other indigenous artworks provoke suspicion or discomfort, demonstrating how colonial values still condition judgments of artistic legitimacy and cultural worth.
This artwork recentres the Akuaba through a hyperrealistic pencil rendering, presenting it as an object of cultural artistry. Behind it is a blurred depiction of Madonna, symbolising the enduring dominance of Western ideologies in shaping what we consider or appreciate as art. The visual shift of the Akuaba from hyperrealism to reductive outline represents processes of erasure, simplification, and cultural loss produced by colonial and postcolonial systems.
Crucially, the work resists narratives of cultural opposition. Despite visual contrast, both Akuaba and Madonna serve as important iconographies of femininity, nurturing, and motherhood within their respective traditions. By placing them in dialogue, the artwork advances a decolonial framework that foregrounds relationality over difference, proposing that cultural forms, rather than dividing us, reveal shared human values and diverse but interconnected ways of knowing. - the artist