Heather Agyepong is a multi-disciplinary artist and actor. Her practice links with themes of mental health and wellbeing, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive. She adopts a technique of re-imagination to engage with communities of interest and through performance creates a cathartic experience for herself and the viewer.

 focuses on a celebrated African American vaudeville performer Aida Overton Walker – known as Queen of the Cake Walk. The Cake Walk was a dance craze that swept America in the early 1900s, performed originally by enslaved people who mocked and mimicked their slave owners and high society. Postcards of Cake Walk performers were distributed around Europe, where so called ‘negrophilia’ was becoming popular. The representations in these postcards were often grotesque and offensive. Overton Walker was able to counter these problematic narratives of Black performers by reinterpreting the dance, becoming lauded in the process, even being invited to travel to Europe and perform for royalty. By turning the camera on herself while embodying Overton Walker, Agyepong uses satirical commentary to re-depict these charged images as radical declarations of self-worth.

Heather Agyepong is a multi-disciplinary artist and actor. Her practice links with themes of mental health and wellbeing, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive.