I collect and stage textiles as sculptural and spatial gestures that reflect on migration, belonging, and the circulation of material culture. Each garment I use has crossed borders geographically and emotionally before reaching me. I treat these textiles as “anonymous bodies,” charged with invisible stories that are both personal and collective. Through processes of weaving, layering, stitching, painting, and turning garments inside out, I attempt to activate what is overlooked and devalued.

My installations often emerge as assemblages of folded, knotted, and suspended textiles, forming topographies of touch and absence. These works invite viewers to move around them, to sense their materiality, and to confront the emotional and ethical dimensions of what we leave behind.

My work interrogates what happens when these “second skins” are discarded and lose their social function, and enter new cycles of meaning. I approach textile waste not only as an ecological issue but also as a cultural and emotional one. These materials speak of global trade, inequality, and displacement, but they also contain tenderness, traces of care, and the intimacy of everyday life.

My studio becomes a site of transformation where fragments of these lived experiences are reassembled into new constellations. I am drawn to manual processes that slow down the act of making, such as hand-stitching, knotting, and weaving, as gestures of resistance against industrial speed and disposability. These gestures carry both physical labour and emotional weight, and I like to think of them as forms of repair, mourning, and reactivation.

Sampson Addae (b. 1991, Ghana) is based in Oslo. He holds a BA in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, and completed an MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in 2024.

Solo exhibitions include Relics And Warnings, Kunstnerforbundet, 2025, Burdened Skins, KRAFT, 2025, and he has participated in group exhibitions in both Norway and Ghana – among others at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra, 2021, Østlands­utstil­lingen, 2025, and the Autumn Exhibition (Høst­utstillingen), Kunstnernes Hus, 2024.