Henry Obeng
Henry Obeng is a Ghanaian-born artist who received an MFA in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Henry uses photography and Papermaking as mediums in exploring his ideas informed by the natural world, his observations, and his experiences as an international person migrating between cultures.
“WE EXIST.”
A Project by Henry Obeng
“This body of work WE EXIST is an ethnographic study conducted on how illegal African immigrants survive in Wisconsin with a focus on the Madison area. These individuals in the community share similar stories about life and the process of gaining legal status. We Exist is an accumulated data collection from illegal Africans immigrants used in three experimental artistic ideas. As a means to raise awareness about the issue and protecting the identities of these immigrants, their portraits are reconstructed using artificial intelligence (AI) to create unfamiliar faces based on the features of those who are undocumented.
These portraits are accompanied by screen-printed texts that capture some concerns expressed by these immigrants, which are layered several times creating an abstraction that conceals some detail information as well. These images and prints are created exclusively on handmade papers made from textiles collected from these individual immigrants. These textile materials sourced from them are grouped into similar color pallets and are used to reference who an Alien is literally. To illustrate the transformation of raw data and textile materials into printed paper and generated images, some of these textile materials are collaged with portraits. The classification of aliens as non-citizens is artistically portrayed using color photographs and the representation of non-existing human-like faces.”
-Henry Obeng, 2022
