Serwah Attafuah: a powerful and most welcome voice in contemporary Australian art
- Written by The Conversation
Virtuosic digital artistry is on show in Serwah Attafuah’s installation The Darkness Between the Stars, currently showing at ACMI.
The work fiercely challenges stereotypes of black femininity and draws upon the history and culture of the Ashanti people of modern-day Ghana, one of the countries most affected by the Atlantic slave trade and the site of remembrance and pilgrimage for many descendants of the people trafficked as slaves.
Serewah is part of a generation of video artists like Melbourne’s Xanthe Dobbie, British artist Rachel Maclean, and Paris based, French Guianese artist Tabita Rezaire. These artists all channel the moving image culture of gaming and the internet, rather than the cinematic or televisual references of their forebears.
Each of these artists uses exuberant humour and a tough-minded politic to challenge the reductive construction of female and queer identities.
As we pass through the arch at the entry to the gallery, we are greeted by a 3D animation of an ocean reflecting a sky that cycles from starlit to slowly emerging dawn. We are told the arch references the entry to the Elmina castle built by the Portuguese: one of two major points from which enslaved African people were cast into the hell of the Atlantic passage and life in bonds.
African warriors
Beyond the entrance we are faced by a series of five screens in portrait format. Each shows short loops of African warriors, suggesting the idealised – and, here, heroic – forms of game avatars a la Fortnite.
Each of the images is framed in gold e-waste. This brings to mind Congolese street art costumes, similarly made of waste which blend cultural traditions and an Afrofuturist resistance that dares to imagine a better future.
The first portrait is a furred, horn helmeted, and neck ringed warrior woman. Armed with a laser and an automatic pistol, she has further weapons adorning her back ready to be deployed.
Behind and around her are malfunctioning computer screens. One scrolls through an online dating text exchange which evokes the idealised and reductive self-curation of the online profile. This chat is between Jenny and Mark, a FIFO worker on an offshore oil rig in Western Australia. This ties to the images of oil rigs found elsewhere in the show, evoking the plundering of African resources: human and otherwise; historical and ongoing.
The second screen pictures an armoured woman (or cyborg?) atop a rearing tiger. The tiger is an intriguing choice given it is an Asian animal but potentially points to a pan exoticism rooted in the confusion of cultures.
She wields a curved blade amid a savannah populated with umbrella thorn acacia and what appear to be comfortingly homely (and amusing) ground-hugging waratahs in the foreground.
Complicating fetishes
Moving around the room, floating robots accompany another warrior who props against a sword supported by a fragmented classical column.
She stands beneath an oversized moon, evoking an off-world setting, a reading compounded by her protective headwear.
Alongside a writhing snake, we catch sight of her Betty Davis (no, the Black one) super heels: a clear link to the under-remembered pioneer of Afrofuturism.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, KING, 2025.
Still courtesy of the artist.
Continuing this play of sexual provocation and power is the addition of a techno tutu which further accentuates her already thrusting buttocks.
The problematisation of sexualised imagery is one of the exhibition’s central themes. Attafuah toys with the Western fetishisation and fear of Black women’s sexuality.
Occasionally borrowing cliches from the gaming and pornographic worlds, Attafuah forcefully complicates such fetishes by arming four of her five warriors to the teeth. They take aim at us, challenging their construction as passive objects for our visual consumption.
A further figure, singularly unarmed apart from her thorny armbands, appears in the next frame. She runs through a series of coquettish modelling poses in her mesh bodysuit as she stands amid buzzing screens and computer detritus.
In yet another confusingly (and amusingly) stereotyped African landscape she is pictured among palm trees and sand, in what I took to be an evocation of a North African environment complete with desert fortress, oil rig and passing container ship.
In the final of the five portraits a young, braided, and fantastically eyelashed woman takes aim at us with a pistol straight from Star Wars (Rebel Alliance issue, naturally).
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, VENUS, 2025.
Still courtesy of the artist.
She stands hip deep in a lagoon of water lilies and floating CDs. A futuristic city fills the background with a slowly turning wind turbine that sports yellow and black radiation colouring – yet another paradoxical meeting in an exhibition characterised by mixed messages that contradict easy readings.
In The Darkness Between the Stars, Attafuah proves herself to be a powerful, uncompromising and most welcome voice in contemporary Australian art. She proves herself capable of generating sophisticated, nuanced and playful reflections on complex problems that we carry from past to present.
Serwah Attafuah: The Darkness Between the Stars is at ACMI, Melbourne, until June 1.
