Mineral Centres

Artist Adjoa Armah discusses different cosmogonies and de-centring the human with curator Yina Jiménez Suriel. 

Join us to hear Ghanaian British artist, writer, and educator Adjoa Armah in conversation with Yina Jiménez Suriel, curator of the current exhibition at Delfina Foundation.

For this show, Adjoa produced a new sound installation, untitled (esiedze) (2024); a meditation on life and value from the consciousness of gold.

Through their practices, both the artist and the curator have been developing research in relation to more-than-human entities and their roles in processes of transmutation according to different cosmogonies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The symbolic and material commodification of many of these entities sustains the persistence of the human-centered colonial-capitalist regime.

In their discussion, about their research and its material manifestations, the pair will also explore how Adjoa, in her work, displaces the human species from the conversation to explore other points of departure, positing a reconfiguration of our relationships with mineral entities.

Biographies

Adjoa Armah (b. 1988) is a Ghanaian British artist, writer, and educator. Her practice is concerned with the entanglement between narrative form, archival practice, mapping and spatial consciousness, pedagogy, black ontology, ecology, ethnology, and the infra-political. In 2015, Adjoa founded saman archive. Through her archival work, she explores what it might mean to dwell in an archive otherwise, as praxis and an extension of the epistemological horizons of imagination. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Hauser and Wirth (Menorca), Auto Italia (London), fluent (Santander), Salone del Mobile (Milan), and Espace Niemeyer (Paris). Adjoa has taught across art, curating, design, spatial practices, and writing programmes at institutions including Ruskin School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of Westminster, Royal College of Art, and HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design. Adjoa began a DPhil in 2021 in Fine Art Practice at the Ruskin School of Art at University of Oxford, with a working title of Atlantic Marginalia: Writing Black Historiography with the Temporary Consciousness of Sand.

Yina Jiménez Suriel (b. 1994, La Vega, Dominican Republic, lives and works in Santiago) is a curator and researcher and Curatorial Fellow of TBA21–Academy’s The Current IV, a three-year research project entitled otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua. She is Adjunct Curator of the 14th Mercosul Biennial (2024), and Associate Editor of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) for Latin America and the Caribbean. Her curatorial projects include Vehículos. Una revisión (2018) at Casa Quien (Dominican Republic); one month after being known in that island (2020) at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (Switzerland) curated with the artist Pablo Guardiola and co-produced by Caribbean Art Initiative; and the first chapter of the research project de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas (2022) at Pivô (Brazil) and Cinemateca Dominicana (Dominican Republic) co-produced with KADIST. In summer 2022, she was a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London. She is part of the curatorial team for Opening at ArcoMadrid (2023-2024) and has contributed to various international art publications and artist catalogues.

In conversation: Adjoa Armah and Yina Jiménez Suriel

Credits

The de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands] exhibition has been made possible thanks to support from Delfina Foundation’s Network of Latin America and the Caribbean Patrons  – and is part of a series developed in partnership with Pivô, São Paulo, and KADIST, San Francisco.