20/20: Reflections - Zoë Tumika

Chelsea Space and the Decolonising Arts Institute at UAL collaborate once more on 20/20:Reflections, a summer evening programme offering the opportunity to hear directly from some of the second 20/20 cohort of artists about their residencies in national collections.

Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie in conversation with Adjoa Armah

Zoë will present a cartography of thoughts and considerations that emerged during their residency at MIMA, in conversation with Adjoa Armah, anti-disciplinary artist, writer and educator.

Following the success of our earlier collaborative series of talks with the first cohort of artists last summer, 20/20Reflections will also feature the first exhibition of the 20/20 Print Portfolio. Alongside the full series of prints created by each of the 20 artists who have participated in the 20/20 project, the exhibition will also include a series of artist films developed as part of the programme.

Event Timings

6.30pm: Arrival (free refreshments provided)

6.45pm: In conversation (Zoë and Adjoa)

7.30pm: Q&A

8.00pm: Event ends

Biographies

Zoë Tumika is a Black artist based in Glasgow, Scotland, whose practice responds to the tensions between lived experience and dominant narratives of time, place, and identity. Through ceramics, moving image, and an emerging engagement with sound, their work explores the feeling of untethering—navigating multiple temporalities and ways of being. Deeply intuitive and embodied, their material choices are led by instinct and resonance, with clay often forming a central medium for meditation, play, and processing complex cultural and personal collisions.

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities we carry within our bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates the intersections of grief, cultural memory, and resilience, particularly as they emerge within diasporic and post-colonial contexts. Armah is concerned with how identity is metabolised generationally - how grief, joy, and survival are transformed and reconstituted in response to shifting cultural conditions. By tracing the changing values ascribed to objects and materials, she considers how certain regimes of value inscribe power, meaning, and belonging onto specific forms. She explores how memory and trauma permeate and recompose themselves in the spaces we inhabit. Through a multidisciplinary approach, her work interrogates archival and interpersonal silences, staging narrative spaces able to hold what is lost and what is remembered.