Adama Delphine Fawundu’s artistic practice is rooted in African-centered ontologies that challenge Westernized values of constructed social hierarchies based on race, gender, and class. Over the past decade, her work has evolved from traditional photography to a multidisciplinary practice; she uses photography, video, assemblage, installation, and sound to weave together themes such as memory, migration, identity, place, space, and the imaginary. Her diverse West African heritage (Mende, Krim, Bubi, Bamileke) and lineage within the Black Atlas serves as inspiration for her research. She uses collage methods to piece together imagery, sound and materials from specific cultures and spaces to create new visual and auditory languages. Her body is the focus of most of the works as it represents a universal body.
Historical and cultural symbols like water, cotton, hair, and cowrie shells are consistent in Fawundu’s work, and she contemplates the natural landscape and a natural care for the earth. Fawundu’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, El Museo del Barrio in New York and at Project for Empty Space in Newark. She is an associate professor of photography at Colombia University in New York, where she currently lives and works.
