ABOUT
thedaintyfunk@gmail.com
Maud Acheampong (they/them) is a Ghanaian-American New Media Performance artist interested in misery, ugliness, nostalgia, monstrosity and the way they manifest in our digital ecologies – for better or worse. Through Dainty Funk, their digital avatar and horror drag persona, Acheampong embraces that moment of connectivity– between beauty and beast, art and science, technology and feeling. They reject the construct of ‘humanity,’ naming the digital as a site through which ‘human-like’ artificial intelligence reflects the dehumanization embedded in an already racialized technology. These works manifest as self portrait photography, video essay, publication, and performance contending with where we must go when we are denied our humanity.
They are intrigued by the horror of personhood: that one's humanity is contingent on a set of rules, that if you can be ‘dehumanized’ there must also be a ‘humanizing.’ We must become human. They position the monster as a community framework that prioritizes the disfigured, disabled, and ‘inhuman’ among us. In doing so, they call on their audience to reject their own humanity for something more authentic, more freeing…
more monstrous.