Artist Biography
Mawuli Afatsiawo was born in 1974 in Accra, Ghana. After attending school in London, he returned to Ghana in 1986, graduating with a BA in painting from the College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University, Kumasi, in 1999. Afatsiawo's interest in media began with a workshop in 1999 given by Marcel Odenbach, at the College of Art, Kumasi. He participated in the exhibition Blick-Wechsel: African Video Art, Berlin, 2001, and was artist in residence at IFA Galleries in Bonn, Germany, 2000. Afatsiawo has shown work in several exhibitions in Ghana, as well as the Hanover Expo, 2000; the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, 2002; the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany, 2003–04; and the African Film Festival, EAI, New York, 2003. In 2005 he was artist-in-residence at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, where he initiated new works based on the economic exchange between Ghana and the world. Afatsiawo is creative director for Enscrypt Ltd, a multimedia advertising production agency based in Accra, Ghana.
Works
Made in Ghana (Man in a box; On a journey) 2000–05
Artist Statement
My continent has been given many labels over the years; Africa evokes many different sentiments from different people. My practice of art has been influenced by the greatest single factor that informs all these labels: poverty and our relationship with it. Everything about my world is interpreted through the filter of poverty. It seems we cannot escape it, is it becoming the only truth we know? … yet perhaps not. My art is my attempt to find expression through this haze that is poverty. To give my opinion through the use of new media
