COUMBA SAMBA

Early Years and Background

Born in Harlem in 2000, Samba spent her formative years moving between New York and Senegal, an experience that fundamentally structured her artistic concerns with borders, displacement, and transnational economics. She studied at Camberwell College of Arts Foundation and Rhode Island School of Design, where she developed her practice across multiple mediums.

Currently based between New York and Europe, Samba’s geographical mobility mirrors the subject matter of her work—the circulation of objects, forms, and ideologies between the West and West Africa. This lived experience informs her investigation of how economic suppression and hope function as competing forces in global systems.

Coumba Samba’s Artworks

Samba’s artistic practice centres on rendering visible the often-invisible economies that structure daily life. Working with found and natural materials—from sand to mud, plastic to steel—she transforms everyday objects into vessels for exploring how institutional power and cultural identity intersect.

Colour, Politics, and Abstraction

In Red Gas (2024), exhibited at Arcadia Missa in London, Samba installed reclaimed home radiators across the gallery space, hand-painted in colours extracted from a photograph of former Senegalese President Macky Sall shaking hands with Vladimir Putin at the Russia-Africa Summit in 2023. This work distils complex geopolitical moments into domestic objects, suggesting how international relations infiltrate intimate domestic spaces. By sampling colours from political events and using them to repaint everyday items, Samba revives formalist strategies to connect contemporary aesthetics with politics on a transnational scale.

Material Traces and Labour

Central to Samba’s recent practice is the use of organic materials as repositories of human action. In Capital (2024), her first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, she created a room-scale mud enclosure—a material that appears repeatedly in her work as both historical archive and temporary surface. Alongside photographic prints, Samba presented __FIFA (2024), a commissioned performance developed in collaboration with choreographer Alesandra Seutin and École des Sables in Dakar. Over nearly one hour, three dancers enacted a choreography inspired by Senegalese Laamb wrestling, South American Queimada, and football, repeatedly throwing themselves onto the mud floor. As the mud dried, it hardened into a crust that permanently preserved the imprints of the dancers’ movements—a metaphor for how labour and exploitation leave material traces in systems that attempt to erase them.

Border Politics and Industrial Minimalism

In Wild Wild Wall (2025), currently displayed at Kunsthalle Basel, Samba installed 176 steel poles spaced precisely four inches apart along the institution’s exterior wall. This spacing references the measurement adopted by the George W. Bush and Trump administrations for the United States-Mexico border wall. What initially appears as a nod to minimalist sculpture functions as an evocation of national boundaries and their arbitrary, constructed nature. The work questions how such precise measurements determine which bodies can circulate globally and which remain contained.

Interdisciplinary Expansion

Alongside her visual art practice, Samba co-founded NEW YORK, an experimental pop music project with artist Gretchen Lawrence. Their debut album No Sleep Till N.Y. (2022) synthesises electro-clash and reggaeton with deadpan, confessional lyrics; their follow-up Rapstar (2024) maintains the project’s aesthetic of “slick, empty generality” while exploring themes of labour, desire, and self-determination. This musical practice extends Samba’s broader investigation into how neoliberal performances shape cultural production and whose voices are centred in institutional spaces.

Coumba Samba’s Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Wild Wild Wall, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2025
• deutschland, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, 2025
• 1100-651 Lisboa, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, Portugal, 2025
• Dress Code, empire, New York, USA, 2024
• Red Gas, Arcadia Missa, London, United Kingdom, 2024
• Capital, Cell Project Space, London, United Kingdom, 2024
• This is Money, Drei, Cologne, Germany, 2024
• Slow Dance (3), Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2023
• Couture, Galerina, London, United Kingdom, 2023

Select Group Exhibitions

• Undermining the Immediacy, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, 2025
• Ensemble, The Perimeter, London, United Kingdom, 2025
• ZONE, Reena Spaulings, New York, USA, 2024

Website and Instagram

Coumba Samba’s website can be found at coumbasamba.com, and her Instagram can be found @savecoumba.

More Reading

Coumba Samba’s practice has been featured in leading publications and platforms. Critical essays on her work have appeared in CURA. magazine, Flash Art, Mousse Magazine, Interview Magazine, and Document Journal.

Coumba Samba FAQs

Ocula | 2026