Serwah Attafuah – Between this World & the Next, 2024

A monumental frame surrounds a video by Serwah Attafuah, giving its digital world the presence of a history painting. Its scale and ornament evoke the pictorial traditions of museums such as the Louvre, translated into a digital, Afro-futurist register. Its gilded excess is knowingly gaudy, combining museum grandeur with the material language of technological waste. Within the video, avatars move through radiant wastelands shaped by the artist’s ancestral histories and experience as a Black woman in Australia. Built from circuit boards, cables and obsolete devices gathered in Lyon, the frame links spiritual ideas of ancestry and histories of extraction to an economy of consumption and obsolescence. Sound carries the moving image beyond the frame, extending this speculative world into the surrounding space.

Digital image-making, sound and immersive technologies shape Serwah Attafuah’s practice, where speculative environments are inhabited by Afro-futuristic avatars and shifting virtual landscapes. Informed by mythology, science fiction and personal experience, her work explores how ancestral narratives persist within contemporary digital culture. Moving between visual and sonic forms, the artist questions dominant representations of identity and femininity, while imagining alternative worlds.