Ama BE
Ama BE is an interdisciplinary artist who explores dimensions of embodiment through ritual-adjacent performance, screen-based media, and sculpture. She probes porous distinctions between materiality and sentience; indigeneity and memory as it relates to
personal, familial, and forced migrations.
Through the lenses of her Ghanaian heritage and American upbringing, she interrogates materials with antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, spirituality, and healing through recurrent use of tobacco, sugarcane, palm oil, (bodies of) water, and lace in her practice. Her research-informed practice questions the effects of commodification on these bodies as she traces their lineages of form to reimagine contemporary function(-s). In obscuring definitions of place, presence, and embodiment, she plays with notions of time collapse in her work to develop conceptual frameworks for African "futurist" performance art.
Ameera Kawash
Ameera Kawash is a Palestinian-Iraqi-American artist, startup co-founder, and creative technologist. Her PhD research focuses on digital retooling as an artistic practice drawing from speculative, decolonial, and care-base methods. Staying with embodiment and vulnerability, her work centers architectures of agency, care, and community in overwhelmingly nonconsensual and traumatic digital systems.
In addition to art making and research, she is the co-founder of Orbital Bloom, a sustainability startup based in London.