Sarah Ama Duah’s practice explores the dynamics that animate grand narrations of history and their relation to material and immaterial memory cultures. In her 2023 performance to build to bury to remember, the artist and several performers adopt an expanded notion of sculpture as their bodies perform temporary monuments, challenging the rigidity of historical statues.

As an extension of this line of questioning, Duah’s Daffodils for feast day (2023/24), shown here, engages the various artistic representations of Völkerfreundschaft (‘friendship between peoples’) that populated the cities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and that remain visible today. Across East Berlin, Dresden, Halle, Leipzig, and other cities of the former East, various artists designed monuments that captured the GDR’s vision of internationalism. These sculptures, while varied in figuration and technique, were attempts to memorialize the state’s policies while also propagating the role of art as a function of producing public space.

Taking up these manifestations of political friendship as points of interest and contention, Duah’s sculptural assembly recounts the ways in which biographical accounts and micro-histories of exchange undergirded the state’s official narrative. Duah’s work responds to the monumentalization of socialist internationalism with an ode to those whose lives were entangled in its political mechanisms: plaster casts of body parts, threads of fabric, silicone, and archival documents both private and official echo the stories of migrant labour, speak to the bodies of women under regulation, and fabulate possibilities of complicated solidarities. Beyond the major stories of solidarity between nation states—consolidated as contractual agreements or geopolitical alliances—Duah insists on highlighting the intimate, the complicated, the obscured, and the untold.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Sarah Ama Duah and HKW, 2023–24.

Work in the exhibition: Daffodils for feast day (2023/24), relief and installation, plaster, silicone, paper, 175 cm × 60 cm × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist