salt 17: Adama Delphine Fawundu
September 13, 2025–June 14, 2026
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
Few artists are willing to stand inside the shadow of empire without flinching. To navigate the afterlives of colonial history and confront its greed and corruption, the erasure of ancestral knowledge, and the dismissal of ways of seeing that extend beyond the physical eye is to enter deeply demanding terrain. Yet in her salt 17 exhibition, Adama Delphine Fawundu descends into history’s deepest wounds and emerges radiant as an intellectual and creative force sharpened by the encounter.
Born in New York and fully embodying her African roots and lineage (the artist is of Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi descent), Fawundu does not collapse under the weight of these histories. A rigorous transcontinental practitioner, she travels to historically fraught spaces, gathering materials for what she described in her 2025 UMFA artist talk as a “living archive.” The work carries heavy themes: the ravaging effects of colonization, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the over-extraction of minerals and precious metals, and the ecological depletion built on the backs of enslaved peoples, yet it refuses to aestheticize suffering.
Water operates as a profound cosmological force throughout the exhibition. In the two-channel video installation Vibrations from the Deep (2025), filmed across Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Brazil, and the United States, including footage from the Great Salt Lake, viewers become immersed in water, chanting, and embodied gesture. At the entrance, a wall text invokes the Yoruba deity Olokun, sovereign of the deep ocean and guardian of its mysteries. In Yoruba cosmology, Olokun governs the vast, unseen depths where abundance, memory, and spiritual force reside. The invocation situates water not merely as element but as sentient presence, as ancestral archive, as inexhaustible source.
