Watch the online conversation between artists Adjoa Armah, Abe Odedina and Hannah Catherine Jones. This discussion expanded on the themes of journeys, language, staging, storytelling, temporality and the voice presented within Armah’s exhibition The sea, it slopes like a mountain, that is on view at Auto Italia until 24 July 2022.

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, writer and editor with a background in design anthropology. Her practice is concerned with the entanglement between narrative, the archive, pedagogy, black ontology, infrapolitics, and spatial consciousness. She is founder of Saman Archive, a gathering of photographic negatives encountered across Ghana, through which she explores models of institution building grounded in Akan temporalities and West African technologies of social and historical mediation. She is editor and research fellow at Afterall, where she is responsible for the Paul Mellon Centre-funded digital research project ‘Black Atlantic Museum’ and the ‘Afterall Art School’, platform.

Abe Odedina had a successful architecture career before starting to paint on a trip to Brazil in 2007. His compositions incorporate elements of Renaissance portraiture, devotional painting and even pop art to frame figures from diverse mythologies (Yoruba, Haitian, Ancient Greek) as well as passers-by or characters plucked from the artist’s own imagination. Odedina, together with The Underground Museum, Los Angeles was awarded the 2017 Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, New York. Odedina’s work is in a number of major international collections including The British Government Art Collection, the Serge Tiroche Collection and the collection of Jorge Pérez.

Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones (aka Foxy Moron) is a London-based artist, scholar, multi-instrumentalist, broadcaster and DJ (BBC Radio/TV, NTS – The Opera Show), composer, conductor and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra – a community project established in 2013. Jones recently completed her AHRC DPhil scholarship at Oxford University for which the ongoing body of work The Oweds was presented as a series of live and recorded, broadcast, audio-visual episode-compositions, using disruptive sound as a methodology of institutional decolonisation and was awarded with no corrections. Jones was a recipient of the BBC Radiophonic Oram Award for innovation in music (2018) and has been nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Award as a composer. Jones has lectured/performed/exhibited widely, internationally, including exhibiting Owed to Diaspora(s) at NIRIN – 22nd Biennial of Sydney, and has her first solo exhibition upcoming in London in September 2022.