THE SEGMENT ‘JOURNAL GOES SLEEK’ IS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN SLEEK AND JOURNAL, THE MAGAZINE OF THE BERLIN UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS. SLEEK INVITES THE JOURNAL EDITORS TO SHOWCASE WORK FROM THEIR CURRENT ISSUE.
The German–Ghanaian artist Sarah Ama Duah works across sculpture, performance, and dressmaking, building a multidisciplinary practice in which the body remains central. Her figurative approach serves as an anchor for larger narratives – expansive historical reference points intertwined with the intimate threads of her own family history. Through material-oriented processes and artistic research, Duah constructs tangible scenarios that explore how the Afro-Diaspora navigates, resists, and reshapes spaces.
At the core of her material vocabulary are wax, plaster, silicone, and latex, substances she manipulates into sculptures, installations, and wearables. These materials, each with their own instability or refusal to fully fix into permanence, allow Duah to probe the fragile boundaries of memory and symbolism.
Wax, for instance, occupies a particularly poetic role. Like clay, it can be shaped into countless forms without fully surrender – though lacking clay’s final solidification through fire, wax never resolves into a fully permanent body. Duah’s life-sized wax head in Mother of Many (2025) inhabit precisely this suspended moment: quiet, contemplative, their closed eyes and sealed mouths suggesting that everything has already been spoken, leaving only the echo awaiting response. That thickening silence then becomes itself a bodily experience for the viewer.
Her installations often appear fragmented, inviting viewers into symbolic exchanges between past and present. In these incomplete gaps – where memory falters and is reshaped – her stories take shape. In Obroni, 2019–2023, church-like reliefs adorn a pair of notorious “Adiletten”, while an angelic silicone bust hovers from the wall, fragile yet resolute and not at all from another time but very much anchored in the here-and-now.
Silicone reappears throughout her work, sometimes animated as sculptural clothing like in Sculpture Dresses, 2021, shows forms that seem to hold themselves, yet never quite achieve full self-sufficiency.
Across these shifting materials and embodied forms, Duah crafts a practice that is intimate, searching, and immediate. Her works unfold through narrative and offer a vocabulary for imagining: multiplicity, elusiveness, and transition, each piece a gesture toward understanding how bodies carry stories across time and space.
All photography by MICK VIZICENZ and ANNINA LINGENS