Rebecca Pokua Korang has been selected as the Rhodes Art for Global Impact Artist in Residence for 2025, and has taken up her new role within the Rhodes community. Rebecca, whose residency will reflect on the theme Radical Joy, was selected from more than 1,000 entries by a judging panel which included Royal Academician Rana Begum, performance artist Adelaide Damoah, art critic Tabish Khan and gallerist Julie Taylor.
In the coming months Rebecca will engage with the Rhodes Trust community, and has already spent time in Oxford meeting local art experts. During her visit to Rhodes House in February Rebecca led an interactive workshop for a group of Scholars, encouraging them to explore tools for cooperation and the practice of performative research as frameworks to cultivate radical joy. Rebecca’s time with the Trust will culminate in an installation at Rhodes House in Autumn 2025.
Reflecting on her time with the Trust so far, and hopes for the year ahead, Rebecca commented: “My stay at Rhodes Trust has been both welcoming and thought-provoking. Engaging with Scholars from around the world, each carrying different inheritances of colonial histories, has deepened my reflections on Rhodes House - its colonial testament and the reverberations of its past in the present. This has brought the concept of hauntology to the foreground, making visible what lingers and refuses to be forgotten, linking the spaces we inhabit, the archive, and history itself. The haunting within colonial archives, such as those of the Pitt Rivers Museum, is both unsettling and deeply engaging. At the same time, I am curious about how we can cultivate radical joy through community and creative practice - as acts of reclamation and transformation.”
Rebecca Pokua Korang is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural educator based in Berlin. Her work navigates the intersections of movement, mixed media, and space, using video, sound, and textiles to craft layered narratives that explore the complexities of identity and history. Storytelling lies at the heart of Korang’s approach, as she investigates how memories bridge the personal and the collective. With a focus on Black histories in Germany and the enduring legacy of German colonialism, her practice is rooted in Afro-diasporic and intersectional feminist discourses.
Korang’s recent group exhibitions include: 'Forgive us our Trespasses’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2024; ‘VULlNE|RA|BLE’, KOW, Berlin, 2024; Lagos Biennal, 2024. Her most recent solo exhibition is ‘Call me STR-Anger’ at Palermo Galerie in Stuttgart, 2024. In 2024 she won the Yaa Asantewaa Prize as 2nd runner up in Ghana and was short-listed for the international art competition for a decolonial memorial at Global Village Berlin with the project ‘The Ghost of a Memorial’.
The Rhodes Art for Global Impact Residency is an initiative that aims to harness the power of art to address pressing global issues and promote social justice. The Rhodes Trust is supported in the delivery of this work by Lizzie Collins of Atelier Zuleika Gallery, Woodstock.