Sampson Addae is a Ghanaian, Oslo-based artist working across sculpture, textile, painting, and installation. His artistic practice investigates death and life as entangled material conditions, exploring how bodies, objects, and materials move through cycles of presence, disappearance, decay, transformation, and renewal. His practice has developed through a sustained engagement with used textiles as both material and metaphor, functioning as an intermediary between body and absence, intimacy and loss, memory and disappearance.

His collection of used clothing, which he describes as “anonymous bodies,” occupies an ambiguous state between life and death once separated from the people who inhabited the garments. They remain as residual forms, neither entirely absent nor fully present, through which Addae questions the boundaries between what is considered living, dead, and capable of becoming otherwise. Through these anonymous bodies, Addae creates spaces in which disappearance, mourning, survival, transformation, and renewal can coexist.

These anonymous bodies therefore complicate the idea of death as a definitive ending. Creases, stains, tears, repairs, faded surfaces, smells, stretched fibers, and other signs of wear become traces of bodies that are no longer present. Rather than functioning simply as signs of deterioration, these marks operate as a material archive of absence, allowing loss, damage, memory, and renewal to inhabit the same form.

By cutting, knotting, binding, weaving, and assembling, Addae transforms these anonymous bodies without attempting to restore them to their previous states. Their former identities and functions are deliberately disrupted, allowing unfamiliar material bodies to emerge. Destruction and creation therefore become inseparable processes in his work.

Transformation, therefore, does not erase death or return the material to an imagined state of wholeness. Instead, Addae approaches rebirth as a continuation through rupture.