Oforiatta Ayim was born into a family that belongs to the Chieftaincy institution ; her maternal grandfather, Nana Sir Ofori Atta I, was the reigning king of Akyem Abuakwa in the pre-independence era. His lineal heirs, the Ofori-Attas, are now Ghana's most powerful political family. Oforiatta Ayim was raised primarily in Germany and England, as well as in her ancestral homeland in Ghana. After attending a number of schools, she received bachelor's and master's degrees, and was working toward a doctorate in African languages and cultures at the University of London.
Writing
Her first novel was published by in 2019. Writer Ayesha Harruna Attah describes the book as an "expansive and contemplative debut, themes of art, history, literature, film, and legacy intermingle with Maya's coming-of-age. In the New York Times, Tope Folarin writes: "This is a story that is obsessed with stories; indeed, 'The God Child' could be described as a series of sharply drawn short fictions, each consequential on its own, each only glancingly connected to the others… As I read this book, with all its leaps in time and space, I sometimes had the sense that there was another narrative running just beneath the surface of the text, some alternate story that the characters I was reading about simultaneously inhabited… Kojo and Maya's migrations eventually lead them back to Ghana, where they hope to find material they need to complete their story, years in the making. A story that, like this one, will illuminate Ghana's history; a story that will coax something whole from the broken parts of their lives." In The Guardian, Sarah Ladipo Manyika writes: "To date, there are only a few works of fiction that explore the African experience within continental Europe and just a handful address the Afro-German experience, so Ayim's book is important in helping to fill this gap. As we hear Maya pondering Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur and reflecting on just how lacking world literature actually is, books such as The God Child have the potential to enrich it and, in Berger's words, bring new ways of seeing."
Art history
She has written widely on cultural narratives, histories, and institutions in Africa. She speaks regularly on the of knowledge and museums. To this end, she has created a pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia. The New York Times writes: "The encyclopaedia will consist of an open-source internet platform for documenting past, present and future African arts and culture and eventually will be published in 54 volumes, one for each country. An ambitious undertaking, the Cultural Encyclopaedia aims to change perceptions of the continent and help alleviate the frustration of African cultural producers concerned that their rich histories have been lost or forgotten over the decades because they lack good archives." She has also created a new type of "mobile" museum. In The Guardian, Charlotte Jansen writes: "Ayim said she started to reflect on the museum model in Africa while working at the British Museum. Struck by how differently African objects were encountered in display cabinets in the UK with how they were actively used in festivals back home, she began to think about how material culture could be preserved and presented in a way that was more in keeping with local traditions." After curating the first institutional shows of several Ghanaian artists, including James Barnor, Felicia Ansah Abban and Ibrahim Mahama, she curated the much acclaimed Ghana Freedom exhibition as Ghana's first ever Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In an interview with the Financial Times, Ayim said: "It sometimes feels like everything happens in the diaspora. That's important and it's part of who we are. But now we need to focus on evolving work in our continent." She is the founder of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge in Accra, and has said that "like a lot of people involved in creative work in Ghana and other parts of Africa, it feels like it's not just enough for us to produce, but that we have to provide the context and the paradigms for that production."
Films
She became a filmmaker after working with economist Thi Minh Ngo and filmmaker Chris Marker on a new translation of his 1954 filmStatues Also Die. Oforiatta Ayim's films are a cross of fiction, travel essay, and documentary and have been shown at such museums as The New Museum, the Tate Modern, the Kunsthall Stavanger, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Awards and honours
Oforiatta Ayim is the recipient of the 2015 Art & Technology Award from LACMA and of the 2016 AIR Award, which "seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work". She was named one of the Apollo "40 under 40", as "one of the most talented and inspirational young people who are driving forward the art world today", a Quartz Africa Innovator, for "finding new approaches and principles to tackle many of the intractable challenges faced on the continent", one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report, one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women "building infrastructure, both literally and metaphorically, for future generations in Africa and in the Diaspora" in 2020 by OkayAfrica. She was a Global South Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. and is a member of the University's Advisory Council.
