Biography

Vera Obeng is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and photographer currently based in Auburn, Alabama. Her practice moves across photography, installation, photo transfer, wood, beads, fabric, found objects, and material experimentation, with a sustained interest in memory, expanded portraiture, presence and absence, and the relationship between images and the objects that carry them.

Obeng began her creative journey through photography and later expanded her practice through formal training in painting and sculpture. She holds an HND from Takoradi Technical University, a diploma in photography from the Photography Institute in London, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

Her bodies of work include Our Forefathers, Beautiful Burden, The Extent of Nothingness, The Black & White Experience, Ama Totoi: A Self Odyssey, and My Family Portrait, developed through the Ghanaian-German Swap Families exchange project. Across these projects, Obeng has explored ancestry, feminine labour, identity, grief, transformation, family histories, and the possibilities of extending photographic portraiture into sculptural and material forms.

Her work has been presented in Ghana and internationally, including at the British Council in Kumasi, Prempeh II Library at KNUST, and Alte Feuerwache in Cologne, Germany. She also contributed photographic research to Old Parks, New Futures, a British Academy-funded collaborative research project involving KNUST, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of East Anglia.

Obeng is affiliated with blaxTARLINES KUMASI and is a founding member of eX-para-Mental, an experimental collective and laboratory for multidisciplinary artistic and theoretical inquiry.

Her current research continues to expand the possibilities of portraiture beyond the individual body. Through her ongoing Camp Hill Portrait project in Alabama, she is investigating how people, objects, landscape, memory, and community histories can come together to form a portrait of place.