a statement
Home has always been a liminal space for me - growing up between multiple African cities made me sensitive to place, language, and body. My work at its core feels through the question of, “What does it mean to be at home in the world?”. In this same world where truth often fades into obscurity, and binaries (of race, gender and other) determine our rights to space, love and time – I offer my art as an interlocutor.
Working as both witness and portal, I am interested in how our daily experiences exist within the mythic, political and intimate. In my process, the myth is not only folkloric, it represents the slippery nature of right and wrong. The myth of either having to belong somewhere or nowhere at all.
My practice is a shapeshifter, a reflection on the pluralities and multiplicities that emerge from being many things – African, Black, Woman, Queer, Foreigner, Other. Feeling through the humanness that exists between this othering, Otherness emerges not only as an identity, but as an expansive metaphor; a fertile darkness from which new visions of self and society can be born.
a bio[graphy]
Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian artist and writer whose practice explores the intersections of body, language, and myth. Working across video, textiles, performance, installation, and text, her work responds to questions of belonging, memory, and how we make sense of ourselves in the world.
Amani’s practice is both a witness and a portal; observing the structures that shape our realities while inviting audiences to imagine what lies beyond them. Drawing from personal experience, spiritual ecologies, and feminist thought, she explores the fluid space between the political, the domestic, and the intimate. Her approach anti-disciplinary and always evolving - reflecting a belief in art as a site of transformation, resistance, and critical dreaming.
She has exhibited internationally, with recent presentations at Hastings Contemporary (UK) and Museen Stade (Germany). Amani was awarded the 2023 Foundwork Art Prize and the 2022 Ingram Prize. Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Hyperallergic, and Texte zur Kunst. She is currently based in Oxford, where she is completing a practice-led DPhil in Fine Art at the University of Oxford.
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