Nearing Each Other: Addoley Dzegede

Nearing Each Other, the 89th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Series, invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation.

Addoley Dzegede’s series of batik portraits, Family Album (2021–2024), features family and friends from her father’s photo album. While looking through these albums, stories emerge about individuals like baby Richard—the artist’s half-brother who passed away from illness at an early age—or her great-great-grandfather Togbe Sosa Adugudu. These reminiscences from her father help to inform who Dzegede features in her work. Batik is a type of handmade wax-resist dyeing technique that is prominently used in textiles made in Ghana today and signifies the material and site-specific relationships of this work. Though originating from Java, Indonesia, Dutch merchants industrialized wax-resist processes during their colonial expansion and introduced African wax prints in the mid19th century to sell in West African markets. Complicating ideas of identity and authenticity, Dzegede’s work explores the potential of materials, textile traditions, and the ways color and pattern are used as a means to assign belonging.