Hip Hop Culture in Ghana and Beyond with Essé Dabla-Attikpo

A current resident at Villa Albertine in partnership with ADAMA, Essé Dabla-Attikpo is studying the intersection between hip hop and contemporary art and researching representations of Blackness in hip-hop culture by Black visual artists. Essé Dabla-Attikpo’s talk at MODA will focus hip-hop in Ghana and how hip-hop culture influences communities, lifestyle, and design. Her talk will complement MODA’s exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, opening on October 14.  

This talk is presented by MODA, Atlanta Sustainable Fashion Week, Adama, Villa Albertine and France-Atlanta.

Essé “Essenam” Dabla-Attikpo is an independent Curator and Art Consultant, expert in production of cultural events with close to 10 years of experience in West Africa. Her main interests are African Contemporary Art and Urban Cultures. She is the Co-director of yoyo tinz an organization archiving, promoting and documenting hip hop culture and the Founder of This No Be Art – Art consultancy. As Co-director of yoyo tinz, Essé worked to produce the first-ever Ghanaian hip-hop festival in Accra in 2018, celebrating hip-hop in all its forms: graffiti, rap, dance, DJing, beatboxing, lifestyle and much more.

Essé Dabla-Attikpo is the first resident of the Bridge Residency, a project in partnership between the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) and Villa Albertine. The Bridge Residency creates new points of access and interaction between the various experiences of Africans and African-descendents in Atlanta, a city known as a Black creative, economic, educational, political, and technological hub.