Samuel Baah Kortey (Kristo)

Asafo black is an Artist collective established by six artists emerging from the Kumasi College of Art, Ghana in 2017. The artists, Nuna Adisenu Doe, Samuel Baah Kortey (Kristo), Denyse Gawu-Mensah (ScorpioEyes), Larry Adorkor (Bonchaka), Jeffery Otoo (Money_Geta) and Daniel Mensah (Scrapa) whose independent practices have been actively involved in the critical discourses surrounding contemporary art across the globe. Their ideas are heavily influenced by Hip-Hop culture, club energy and nightlife scene; by the town, proverbial traditions and popular commodities; by religious iconography and classical painting; by material exploration as well as conceptual dematerialization. 

 Through their Guerrilla-tactic interventions that materialize into blockbuster exhibitions, art talks and “linkup”, Asafo black seeks to sensitize the community on the significance of Art and its potential to stimulate challenging conversations and ideas that tickle our sensitivities toward socio-political discourses. The collective advantageously positions itself as a body to initiate experimental and multi- faceted programming by collaborating across diverse disciplines to carve new ideas and approaches to art dissemination and its independent practices.

 These artists test strategies to fuse in spaces, bodies and narratives in ways that are both conventional and off the grid, directed and self-forming. Their critical interrogation of material, space and form is evident in their individual works that embraces the hybridity of contemporary art discourse, exploring connections and disconnections between popular culture and subculture, chance and exploration, figuration and abstraction and of the physical and digital. Asafo black cross-pollinates genres and geographies that speak to a certain universal through experimenting and testing the limits set out for them.