Sampson Addae
Relics and Warnings
The Exhibition Rooms in The 2nd Floor
07.08.—07.09.2025
Sampson Addae is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sculpture, textile, and installation. His practice stems from an intent to activate the overlooked and the devalued, drawing on materials situated at the periphery of social and economic systems. With a distinct sensitivity to the biography of textiles, Addae employs discarded clothing both as medium and as a vessel for social, political, and emotional narratives—what he refers to as “discarded bodies.”
A central concern in Addae’s artistic practice is the articulation of connections between the personal and the global, between multiple lived realities and his own experiences across Ghana and Norway. A garment donated in Oslo does not stand apart from a pile of used clothes in the Kantamanto Market in Accra, it is embedded within a material economy shaped by global resource flows, transnational movement, affective value systems, and, crucially, unequally distributed consequences. Through processes of collection, reconfiguration, and spatial staging, Addae gives form to narratives of migration, belonging, economic asymmetry, and the residual matter of consumer culture.
His sculptural works, developed through manual processes such as weaving, layered stitching, painting and turning garments inside out, destabilise the boundaries between body and object, care and detachment. The works operate as both aesthetic and ethical gestures of resistance.
Sampson Addae (b. 1993, Ghana) is based in Oslo. He holds a BA in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, and completed an MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in 2024.
Solo exhibitions include Burdened Skins, KRAFT, 2025, and he has participated in group exhibitions in both Norway and Ghana – among others at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra, 2021, Østlandsutstillingen, and the Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen), Kunstnernes Hus, 2024. The exhibition at Kunstnerforbundet marks his Oslo debut.
Mediation and community-based work is an integral part of Addae’s artistic practice, and he has led workshops, public conversations, and collaborative artistic projects involving children, students, and diverse publics in a range of institutional contexts. He is currently a studio artist at Kunstnernes Hus through the residency programme FKDS for recent graduates from KhiO, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.