For her solo exhibition Welcome to the Jungle , Owusu will adapt a selection of her films to premiere in a brand new installation. In addition to the institutional debuts of White Afro (2019) and Pelourinho, They Don’t Really Care About Us (2019), Owusu will present for the first time together the three works that comprise a hair trilogy, which are manifestations of what she describes as her “warring consciousness.” In addition to White Afro , these include Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful (2012) and the award-winning Me Broni Ba (2009). The exhibition marks a significant new direction for Owusu, as the filmmaker brings her acclaimed films into the context of an exhibition.

Owusu’s uniquely visceral style of filmmaking and storytelling possess a rhythmic quality that dismantles monolithic, reductive, and Western-centric renderings of exoticism and otherness in identities. She employs various production techniques to visualize a state of “triple consciousness,” a concept that extends sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness to a third cinematic space. She describes the triple consciousness as experienced in: the African diaspora having to assimilate to white American culture in order to succeed in American society; the African immigrant often being grouped and identified with black Americans in the eyes of others, mostly due to a shared skin color; and many Africans not necessarily identifying with black American culture and history, their distinct culture rendered marginal. Trafficking in the complex contradictions of blackness, displacement, and memory, her films extrapolate the greater cultural anxieties surrounding her racial legacy. Owusu is, at once, “too” Ghanaian in America and “too” American in Ghana, and she seeks to locate a space between the two worlds that she can call home.

Akosua Adoma Owusu (b. 1984) is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer whose films address the collision of identities. Often combining personal ethnography and cultural representations of beauty in her work, Owusu transitions between avant-garde cinema, fine art, and African tradition to complicate the nature of identity. In her works, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural environments. Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness.

Owusu’s films have screened internationally in festivals like International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University Bloomington. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,” she was a featured artist of the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by renowned film curator and critic Dennis Lim. Her film Kwaku Ananse won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award.

Owusu has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Creative Capital, the MacDowell Colony, the Camargo Foundation, and, most recently, from the Residency Program of the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia. She holds MFA degrees in Film & Video and Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts and her BA in Media Studies from the University of Virginia. Currently, Owusu divides her time between Ghana and New York, where she works as a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.