'Afro-futuristic Dreamscapes, Heavenly Wastelands': No One's Making Work Like Serwah Attafuah

A girl sits on the ground, thighs half-tucked underneath her, feet flayed forwards, her Hyper Orange Nike Tns filling the lower half of the frame. Her gaze is vacant, innocent, but and vaguely challenging. Probably something to do with the fact that she appears to be half-tiger. Orange and black stripes stretch across her body, up from her hips, across her chest, down her arm: a leotard that melds with her skin, which shimmers and glitters. Her nails, extending from a hand perched on her knee, are chrome, viciously sharp, and long. She knows she’s hot.

It’s an image I’ve looked at for years: a framed digital print, displayed on my sister’s mantle.

And I’ve wanted to profile its creator, Serwah Attafuah, since I first saw it.

Serwah, also known as @wrath_____ on Instagram, is a 24-year-old digital artist and musician from Western Sydney. Her work fuses surreal with the hyper-real, constructing landscapes that are both futuristic and familiar. Many of her works feature ethereal, digitised girls, innocent but commanding in stature, illuminated by golden light, draped in armour – they are the techno-futuristic goddesses of resplendent dreams.

The digital art world has been booming in recent years, fuelled by the rapid advancements in technology of our times, from AI to NFTs to the burgeoning construction of the metaverse and the unrelenting commotion around Web3. In art, from commercial to high, 3D rendering is ubiquitous. 

It’s positioned self-taught Serwah at the forefront of the new arena in Australia. She recently presented a Ted Talk, My Metaverse, at TEDx in Sydney, where she discussed her vision for the metaverse, and how, since the time of avatar sites, digital worlds helped her to shape her own universes where she could express herself. As well as a string of commercial work for legacy brands including Nike and Maison Valentino, her NFTs have showcased in galleries across Australia and overseas.

Her NFT body of work includes a collaboration with Bhad Babie, Garden of Bhabie, inspired by the Birth of Venus. Another NFT, AETHER: Galaxy Goddess, was selected for inclusion in a Natively Digital show curated by Paris Hilton. Speaking of the work, Hilton said, “femininity, womanhood, and female empowerment are her main focuses and it’s stunning”.

In the weirdly male-centric, occasionally cringe, and inaccessible arena of NFTs and Web3, there isn’t anyone doing what Serwah is doing. Aside from her distinct style, her work is dazzling in its vision, a celebration of femininity, filled with hot, cool girls. VICE sat down with her to talk about it.

Hi Serwah. How would you describe your art to someone who has never seen it?

Like an Afro-futuristic, Renaissance crossover. It’s Afro-futuristic dreamscapes, surreal, heavenly wastelands, populated by abstractions of self.

Beautiful.

I wrote my artist bio, and I was so stoked when I wrote that. I was like, yes… yes. No one's gonna know I didn’t finish Year 10.

Holy shit. It’s so good. How does your background influence the work that you create?

My father's Ghanaian, and my mum is Italian and Dutch. I grew up and still live in Western Sydney. I had a pretty abstract, or crazy, childhood. Both my parents are artists. My dad's a sculptor, but he does welding as a day job. My mum does fabric printing and graphic design, and all kinds of stuff. So I was definitely very influenced by their art, or their practice. 

We used to travel heaps when we were younger. Like going up and down the coast of Australia, doing WWHOOFing and permaculture stuff, going all over the world. So I've been to Ghana, to all the museums there, and I guess being a part of this family has really influenced me in trying to merge all of those cultures into one sort of practice.

So cool. And you started out oil painting, is that right?

Actually, before that, I was a dancer. I was really dead set on dancing, but I just didn't like the nepotism, it totally threw me off. So I just retreated and tried to do something different, and found a bunch of oil paints in a bag in my parents studio-garage, and I was like, I'm gonna do this. And so four out of the five days of school I’d just paint in the garage, or in my room, and it was so fulfilling. I kind of miss being young and just painting and trying to get better.

I really wanted to talk to you because I feel like no one's really doing the work that you're doing in Australia. What have been some of the biggest hurdles to success in this digital art space that's still developing in Australia?

Access was one of the big things. I don't really come from a family with much money at all. There was a time when we were homeless, and that was when I was playing a lot of music. And it sort of came into my mind at that point, like, I can't really create art when I don't have a solid place to live. So digital art was in my mind, and I was dabbling with it at that point. Just doing stupid Photoshop shit. You remember the transparent blogs on Tumblr? I ran one of those, I think it's still up somewhere, I was just making dumb Photoshop things and putting it out there. 

Access to tools and software and stuff like that was a big challenge. And being taken seriously was a big challenge for a very long time. When COVID hit, that was probably when I was taken seriously by the industry, and even my peers. People didn't really see digital art as an artform, just as, like, stupid internet shit.

You’re involved with this whole new digital arena, the metaverse, Web3, NFTs, crypto – it all feels pretty male-centric, would you agree with that?

Totally. I mean, the highest selling pieces, or projects in the industry, are all run by men. And I don't think that's to do with the quality of work or the quality of the pieces that they're putting out. I think it's to do with misogyny, or people aren't ready to come round to it yet. Which is really unfortunate.

What is it like working in that space as a young woman?

It's cool. I feel it's definitely more liberating than the traditional art space. I didn't have a whole lot of experience, before NFTs, in the traditional art space, going back to the fact that people didn't take digital art seriously. But it's good. 

I have the liberty to put out pieces whenever I want and sell them on my own terms, without some man telling me that I can, or some institution telling me that I can, or what the value is. I can just do what I want, which is amazing. But there's still definitely a long way to go. I think it's not even just a metaverse thing or a Web3 thing. I think it's a worldwide cultural and societal issue that we need to get past in every industry.

Speaking of worldwide issues, I guess the most basic, common criticism of the metaverse is that it’s this hi-tech, naive escapism from the very real issues in our real world. How do you wrangle that?

I don't totally disagree, but I definitely don't totally agree that it's just like a naive solution to worldwide issues. 

I think it's something to support the world that we live in. I always say to my friends, you don't understand the metaverse, but you guys spend, like, five to six hours on Instagram every day. Is that not a metaverse? It's just a different way of experiencing things digitally, you know? Especially with the pandemic, I think we realised how important our digital lives are, and digital connections, safety, all of that. And I think that there's no harm in trying to make a better digital world that can include people and include fun or work or what have you.

I don’t claim to understand it. But I’m reading… I’ll get there. What are your main inspirations?

I feel like there are so many, but so spread out in random places. I still do and used to play death metal guitars and crazy punk vocals, so, people don’t really see it in my work but black metal album covers and death metal album covers – the visuals of all that definitely inspires me. It's very fantasy, very surreal, dark. I like that sort of stuff. Renaissance and Rococo paintings, just paintings in general, really inspire me.

How is your sense of self explored in your art?

I never really saw people like myself on gallery walls, which was always a shame growing up, so I try to reimagine scenarios or old themes, even Greek mythology, or Roman mythology, African mythology, scenarios where I can put myself or put people like me. 

A lot of my works feature one person in a somewhat desolate or surreal sort of space, and I guess that comes back to my mental health. I deal with borderline personality disorder, which is something I'm only sort of getting a grasp on right now. But when I reflect back on my work, I probably didn't know what I was trying to do at the time, but was definitely trying to express that illness throughout my work, in a way.

That’s so interesting that it was almost automatic. You’re looking back, like, huh….

Yeah, I was like, Oh, I should send this to my psychologist. Maybe she can help me interpret.

And you mentioned Afro-futurism, what role does that play in your work?

It's not something that I totally focus on, but it definitely just feels natural. When I'm working, I don't often think about what I'm doing. It's just autopilot, like a free flowing jam or feeling. But I really hope that with my works, I'm contributing to the future of my culture or hoping to inspire new ways to move forward. I'm definitely more of a futurist, even though I reference the past quite a lot. 

I really think that looking forward is one of my main goals, whether that be through personal development, or culturally with Afro-futurism, whatever it might be. I'm really focused on moving forward.

And do you have a big goal or dream that you’re working towards?

It sounds dumb, but I want to work with Rihanna. Or Cannibal Corpse. I would die. I just want to be able to make more art. Making more art will be hectic and being able to experiment would be so liberating. I really want to experiment with new technologies, like holograms or stuff like that. Or even just like going back to my painting and merging more of my digital art with painting, that'd be so sick.

So fresh. I think working with Rhianna is such a real goal. Like, that will happen.

That would be crazy. I’m so excited for her performance at the Superbowl, I think that’s why I’ve been procrastinating [laughs]. I'm really hoping to get this studio space this year. I think that’ll really help me grow.

Will you remain in Western Sydney?

Yeah, for sure. I don't think I'd be able to leave. If I was leaving, I'd be leaving the country which is very, very, very low on my list. I've been to a lot of places and nowhere has good food like we do. If you go to a different place, the milk’s all bad, the chocolate’s all bad, the meat’s fucked. We've got good food here. I'm not leaving.

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