Skin Deep

Achsah Seyoum - Jan 17 - Feb. 20

There is something unsettling about Achsah Seyoum’s work at first. You see the marks before you understand them. Faces carry cuts, patterns, and raised textures. The surfaces feel tender and harsh at the same time. Some viewers look away quickly. Others move closer.

Achsah began with an interest in tattoos, the ways people alter the body to carry memory, identity, beauty, or belonging. But while researching body modification practices, she came across histories that shifted her attention elsewhere. She found a paper documenting how European missionaries in African indigenous communities condemned scarification as a “bad practice,” framing it as evidence of primitiveness and backwardness. Over time, these judgments became absorbed into public perception. Practices that once held spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic meaning were pushed aside, hidden, or abandoned altogether.

The discovery stayed with her because the question beneath it felt familiar. Who decides which bodies are beautiful and which are not? Which traditions are preserved, and which are erased?

Her research led her across different communities where scarification still exists today, among the Suri people in Ethiopia, the Batammariba communities across Togo and Benin, and the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. What interested her was not spectacle. It was the seriousness of the practice. Scarification in these contexts was never simply decoration. The marks could signify rites of passage, strength, protection, group identity, spirituality, or personal transformation. Pain itself became part of meaning.

Back in the studio, Achsah began translating these histories onto canvas and silkscreen. She works with silhouettes of scarred portraits, transferring them onto textured surfaces before surrounding them with repeated motifs drawn directly from scarification patterns. The compositions feel layered, almost ceremonial. Rough textures sit against soft pastel tones.

Scarification has often been dismissed through a colonial lens as evidence of harm or savagery, while many forms of body modification accepted globally today, cosmetic surgery, tattoos, fillers, piercings, operate through similar ideas of pain, transformation, and beauty. Achsah’s work does not flatten these differences, but it does expose the inconsistencies in how cultures judge one another.

For Studio 11, supporting practices like Achsah’s matters because they expand what contemporary African art can hold. The work is deeply personal, but it also speaks to larger questions about memory, colonial inheritance, identity, and self-definition. It reminds us that beauty is never neutral. It is shaped by power, repetition, and history.

Achsah’s work pulls those histories back to the surface, literally and emotionally. The marks remain visible. So do the questions.

You can find more information about the current exhibition and the artworks on display on the studio 11 website.