Ranti Bam, NG

Ranti Bam, Born 1982 in Lagos, Nigeria. Lives and works between London and Paris.

Ranti Bam uses clay for its healing and narrative malleability. She clutches and embraces the clay before firing it, like a ritual of transformative performance – thus, offering a part of her identity, the intimacy of her body, and invites us into this common space that is the work. Her work echoes an intention to break certain established forms of sculpture, leaving room for cracks and reconstruction by refining the walls of the sculpture to the maximum.

Through her artistic practice and residencies, and by teaching workshops and interactive sessions – particularly those with members of disenfranchised communities and feminist activists – Bam explore the formal possibilities of clay and the socially engaged aspects ofher practice.

Bam presented her first solo exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko in the autumn of 2024 and is currently having a residency at Black Rock Senegal. For the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, Bam was commissioned to produce a series of sculptures from her Ifa-series, and works from the same series will be exhibited at Market Art Fair.

In 2024 she presented a solo exhibition,Anima, at the James Cohan Gallery, New York and her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection (2023) Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin, and Hard/Soft: Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (2023), Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.