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Tetteh Narh Martin

@tenamas_art

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Tetteh Narh Martin (Tenama) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Eastern part of Ghana.

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uew_official Mr. Martin Tetteh Narh, a National Service Personn at the Department of Art Education at the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) and a prospective MPhil Art Education student, has participated in the New Futures Art Residency 2026 in Cape Town, South Africa, exploring the intersection of art, environmental sustainability and social responsibility.
The residency, themed “(De) composing: Between Extraction and Regeneration,” brought together emerging artists, researchers, educators and activists from across the world to examine environmental, social, political and economic challenges through creative practice. by @tenamas_art

TETTEH NARH MARTIN
tettehnarhmartin21@gmail.com DIMENSIONS: 4 x 4 ft
YEAR: 2026
Title: Fɛo Bɔ (The Marks of Beauty and Endurance)
Materials: Plastic bottles, fired beverage cans, fabrics, and flip-flops
Artist Statement
This mixed-media artwork is a visual archive of global consumption, cultural identity, and
environmental survival, created in Ghana from materials that carry their own deep histories. The
piece is constructed from plastic bottles and discarded flip-flops salvaged from the beach,
interwoven with fabric samples collected from local tailors and seamstresses. While assembled
locally, many of these materials originate in the Western world brought by global trade and ocean
currents specializing the heavy socio-ecological footprint and ongoing influence of foreign waste on
the African continent.
The figure’s face is an intricate assembly of contrasting colors and textures, forming a network of
traces and lines that mimic Fɛo Bɔ the traditional, intentional facial markings of heritage, identity,
and beauty. By reshaping discarded foreign plastic into these permanent cultural markers, the
artwork reframes environmental trauma into a powerful symbol of endurance. In her hand, she
holds a book constructed from salvaged, fired cans. This metallic book serves as a literal and
historical record; its charred, fired metal binds the stories of Western industrial manufacturing to the
local realities of West Africa, turning foreign debris into the pages of a shared global history.
Through this juxtaposition of toxic waste and vibrant community textiles, the artwork stands as a
defiant monument to reclamation transforming the scars of global exploitation into a powerful
narrative of African resilience and creative rebirth. by @tenamas_art

Artwork by Martin Narh Tetteh @tenamas-art. Artist statement: In a society where cans and plastics bottles run rampant harming our environment and community I use these very materials, along with tinfoil and discarded items,to convey a powerful message.Through my artwork,I aim remind viewers that waste management is a shared responsibility.By breathing new life into these forgotten materials,i draw the parallel to the cycle of life and death just as we have the power to bring the discarded back to life we are reminded of our own ability to find beauty and purpose in the most unexpected places. by @tenamas_art

CREDITS
A project by: @iofcusa Executive Director: @mrlegacyjones International Projects Director: @therohitvalecha
Curated by: @collectivewebs | @isadoracanela | @juji________ Executive Production: @victoriamazzia
Faculty & Research: @drdavidandersonhooker | @exploringvisualcultures | @ernstwagner | @avisooful
Local Coordination & Catering: @artafrica_mag by @tenamas_art

@rebecabinda 📸 @newfutures.iof @artafrica_mag by @tenamas_art

Voice of Silence
Tetteh Narh Martin (Tenama)
Cape Town, 2026
Medium: Mixed-media assemblage
This body of work examines the relationship between human behaviour, the environment, and the social structures we construct around ourselves. I work with discarded and found materials collected from my surroundings, including fired wood, burnt aluminium cans, cigarette remnants, packaging, electronic components, fragments of everyday objects, and other materials that have been abandoned within the environment. By gathering and rearranging these materials, I transform what is considered waste into a visual record of human activity.
The burnt wood and fired metal carry traces of destruction and transformation, while the discarded objects retain fragments of their previous lives. In this sense, the materials become witnesses to human behaviour. Their accumulation reflects the ways in which our everyday actions can produce consequences that return to affect us.
The work draws particularly from the experience of flooding in Ghana, where indiscriminate dumping of waste can obstruct drainage systems and contribute to flooding. The materials therefore become metaphors for the consequences of collective behaviour: what we discard does not simply disappear; it remains within our environment and can eventually return to us.#NEW FUTURES
2026
ARTS COLLABORATIVE#Initiatives of Change
United States#WEBS#ARTAFRICA#uew by @tenamas_art

A new body of work born from my residency experience.
Through discarded and found materials, I explore memory, human activity, transformation, and the relationship between people and the environment. What was once considered waste is reassembled into a visual record of our stories, traces, and lived experiences.
Created during the New Futures Arts Collaborative Residency, 2026 Cape Town
#ContemporaryArt #MixedMediaArt #AssemblageArt #InstallationArt by @tenamas_art

by @tenamas_art

This body of work, created with acrylic and pastel on cocoa mat, explores the historical and contemporary entanglements between cocoa, labor, and African identity. Cocoa, now celebrated globally as a source of sweetness and pleasure, carries a complex history rooted in colonial expansion, extraction, and systems of forced labor that shaped global trade.

While cocoa itself was not a central commodity of the transatlantic slave trade, its rise as a global crop is deeply connected to colonial structures that inherited and transformed earlier systems of exploitation. Today, West Africa produces the majority of the world’s cocoa, yet the labor behind it often remains undervalued and unseen.

The figures in this work are marked with symbolic patterns, referencing both ancestral identity and the invisible inscriptions of labor and history carried on the body. Their engagement with cocoa holding, carrying, or surrounded by it suggests both sustenance and burden, pleasure and cost.

By using cocoa mat as a surface, a material directly tied to the commodity itself, the work collapses the distance between object, history, and representation. The surface becomes a site where memory, labor, and global consumption intersect….. #painting on a #cocoa drying mat by @tenamas_art

Painting on a cocoa mat by @tenamas_art

Acrylic paint.l, Pastels on Cocoa mat (cocoa s3ne) by @tenamas_art

Plastic bottles on plywood. The mission is to give new purpose to discarded materials. by @tenamas_art