Naafia Naahemaa: What Appears Solid Is Already In Motion
Naafia Naahemaa, What Appears Solid Is Already In Motion, 0’34”, Moving Image, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
As a material and spirit-based process, art-making is approached by Naafia Naahemaa from a delicate lens. In this photostory, Henrika Amoafo writes to Naahemaa’s work in a series of extended captions — meditating on subtleties, ideas of interiority, healing and form. Among other works, Naahemaa’s ongoing project ‘Amammerɛ’, rooted in the complexities and beauty of Akan tradition, illustrates the temporal and chromatic experiments embedded in this practice.
Naafia Naahemaa’s work often reminds me that we are spiritual beings in human form. I have been sitting with that phrase across months of conversation, Zoom calls, voice notes, drafts written and dissolved. Each time I return to it, something shifts. In encountering her work, I appear to be looking but soon discover I am already inside a process of attunement.
Before the image, there is an interior calibration and a ritual alignment with source. Artmaking is not separate from being, but an extension of it. Being, for Naahemaa, is continuous expression — what appears complete continues to unfold.
Naafia Naahemaa, Interior In Motion, a work in progress, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.A5, Amammerɛ Series, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.A7, Amammerɛ Series, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
At the core of Naahemaa’s approach is a refusal of rigidity, permanence, or freezing of identity into something singular. Her process is about working through spirit. It is never only what can be seen, but also everything still forming.
The use of the color black is not as a backdrop or an absence, but as substance, origin, and the generative field from which form emerges. Red here is an inner ember surfacing into visibility, the moment when interior states manifest as form.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.A10, Amammerɛ Series, Image transferred to woven canvas, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.E 1, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NNT.1, The Unknown, The Truth. Series, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NNT.X 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Within practice, there is life. It is never static. It is always evolving.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.A11, Image transferred to woven canvas, Amammerɛ Series, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Naafia Naahemaa, NN.T 11, The Unknown, The Truth. Series, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Looking closely at NN.T1 (2023), a figure appears four times in the same posture, like a filmic sequence or repetition. It appears static but looking closer, the wound on the muse's arm slowly dissolves in each frame, capturing healing as it is underway. This image, and the entirety of her practice, asks us to open up space for ongoing becoming, expansion, contraction, and return. The unseen labour, the listening, the realigning, all embed in what is shown.
Through listening and slowly finding language alongside Naahemaa’s practice, I began to understand what practice becomes when it moves from source rather than from performance. Naafia Naahemaa trusts depth more than display, spirit more than spectacle.
Where discourse hesitates around spirit and soul, Naahemaa moves through without apology, for her, the aesthetic and the metaphysical were never separate.
Naafia Naahemaa, The Sacred Imprint, 1’13”, Moving Image, 2025, Courtesy of the artist.
À propos de l'auteur
Henrika Amoafo
Henrika Amoafo is a Kenyan Ghanaian curator, writer, and cultural practitioner working at the intersection of art, faith, and community wellbeing. She is drawn to the interior life of artistic practice, to what moves beneath the surface of making, and what art can hold when it emerges from spirit rather than recognition. She tends to the space where the sacred and becoming meet.
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