Yaw Owusu is a Ghanian artist, born in 1992, who lives and works in Accra. He studied at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), graduating with a BA Fine Arts degree in 2016.
IN 2018, he won the Kuenyehia Art Prize for contemporary Ghanian Art.
Owusu builds sculptures out of pieces of loose change known as “pesewa” coins, which were introduced as an attempt to cure the countries economy’s inflation in 2007 but have almost no value nowadays. Owusu has acquired the coins by negotiating with The Central Bank of Ghana.
Owusu’s sculptures can embody up to 24,000 coins, and he treats them with various natural and chemical treatments related to the types of commerce prevalent across Ghana, which is a process performed by the artist to depict the effects of trade and time which would usually change the appearance of exchanged currency. Then the artist would fix the coins onto wooden panels, drape them over walls, or make them loosely hang onto surfaces to form a camouflage. Like that, the installations reflect on the complex processes that demarcate Ghana’s social and political system.
Owusu’s work is the permanent collection of Musée d’Art Contemporain African Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech.