Ranti Bam — How Do We Hold Our Stories?

Ranti Bam, born in Lagos in 1982, is a British-Nigerian artist working across ceramics, sculpture, performance, film, and photography. At the centre of her practice is clay: not as a neutral raw material, but as a living substance, sensitive to pressure, touch, fire, tension, and time. Her sculptures do not simply appear to be made; they seem to emerge from an intense physical conversation between body and matter.

Bam is best known for her Abstract Vessels and her ongoing Ifa series. In both bodies of work, the vessel is not treated as a functional object, but as a body, a carrier, and an inner space. The surfaces of her sculptures can evoke skin, leather, earth, or scar tissue. They reveal vulnerability, but never as weakness; rather, as a condition in which material refuses to hide its history.

The title of her exhibition How Do We Hold Our Stories? touches the core of her practice. The question is not only how stories are told, but how they are carried: through body, language, gesture, earth, surface, and form. In this exhibition, Bam brought together new Ifa sculptures with works from her Abstract Vessels series. The exhibition highlighted her interest in language, the semiotics of the feminine, intimacy, care, fragility, collective bodies, and connectedness.

The Ifa sculptures refer to Yoruba language and meaning. In Bam’s work, the word Ifa carries a double resonance: ifá, divination, and I-fàá, to pull close or draw near. The sculptures are therefore connected both to spiritual knowledge and to physical proximity. They are not closed objects, but forms that draw something towards them: body, place, spirit, and story.

An essential aspect of her process is her bodily engagement with clay. For the Ifas, Bam embraces the clay before firing. This act leaves dents, folds, and tensions in the material, giving each sculpture a distinct physical presence. The works often rest on wooden, stool-like supports, so they appear not only as objects, but as concentrated places of encounter.

Her Abstract Vessels reveal a related sensitivity. They are built from thin slabs of clay, painted or monoprinted with pigmented slip, and then assembled into delicate, elongated forms. Their exteriors are often left unglazed, revealing fragile, cracked surfaces. By contrast, their interiors are glazed: glossy, reflective, almost luminous. This contrast between vulnerable skin and inner radiance gives the works their tension.

In 2026, Ranti Bam has been selected for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys. She is not participating as the national representative of a country, but as an artist within the central international exhibition, shaped by the curatorial concept of Koyo Kouoh. In the Arsenale, she presents five sculptures under the collective title Ifa Ile Oja – Black Ifa. These works appear as dark, almost totemic bodies: not loud, not spectacular, but concentrated and charged.

Her selection feels particularly relevant because her work engages with questions that are urgent today: how do we hold stories? How can material carry history? How can an object reveal vulnerability without exploiting it? And how can clay function as body, archive, spiritual space, and ecological consciousness at once?

Bam seems to have been selected because her work speaks in a more subtle register. Not through spectacle, but through matter, silence, proximity, and inner authority. Her sculptures do not explain everything. They hold something. They show that an object can be a body, a hearth, a boundary, an opening, a place of spiritual and physical nourishment.

What Ranti Bam reveals through her work is that material is never silent. Clay can hold, crack, protect, open, and remember. It can carry a story without fully speaking it. In a time when objects are often expected to be smooth, fast, and perfect, Bam chooses another intensity: surfaces that break, forms that breathe, and matter that refuses to be fully controlled.

Her work asks for a different way of looking. Not at ceramics as decoration or finished product, but at clay as a carrier of body, earth, vulnerability, and inner force. In Ranti Bam’s work, material becomes a place where history, skin, spirit, and touch meet.

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The Value: Material Wisdom

The value that emerges from Ranti Bam’s work is Material Wisdom. This value means that material is not merely a tool for creating form, but carries knowledge, experience, and meaning in itself. In Bam’s work, clay is not a passive raw material. It responds to touch, pressure, fire, and time; it folds, cracks, opens, hardens, and preserves. Her work teaches us that value does not only lie in perfection, control, or smoothness, but also in vulnerability, traces, and transformation. Material Wisdom helps us look more carefully at what surrounds us: objects, bodies, landscapes, and histories that have lived through something. What breaks or changes is not automatically worth less. Sometimes, it is precisely there that what material knows becomes visible.

Material Wisdom means that material knows something.
It knows touch.
It knows tension.
It knows rupture.
It knows transformation.

What Do We Gain from This Value?

This value teaches us to look more carefully at what surrounds us.

We live in a time in which many things are expected to be smooth, fast, new, and replaceable. Damage is often seen as a loss of value. A crack, stain, discolouration, or trace is removed, painted over, or replaced.

Ranti Bam offers another way of seeing. She shows that traces are not only damage; they are also information. Material that has undergone something can speak more deeply. A rupture does not have to be the end. A vulnerable surface can also carry strength.

Material Wisdom helps us understand that value does not only lie in perfection, but in presence, experience, and transformation.

This value helps us become slower in our looking, more careful with materials, and more sensitive to the relationship between body, earth, labour, and object. It asks us not to dismiss too quickly what is damaged, old, vulnerable, or changed.

That matters in a world where so much is consumed, smoothed over, or forgotten. Material Wisdom reminds us that meaning often begins precisely where something carries traces.

What something has lived through may be the very place where value becomes visible.

Sources

• La Biennale di Venezia — Ranti Bam, Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys.
• La Biennale di Venezia — Biennale Arte 2026, central exhibition In Minor Keys.
• Andréhn-Schiptjenko — Ranti Bam: How Do We Hold Our Stories?, 2024.
• Ranti Bam studio website — How Do We Hold Our Stories?
• James Cohan — Ranti Bam: Anima, 2024.