Spike Island presents Are You Coming To Church?, a newly commissioned interactive artwork by Ama Dogbe.

Stemming from a question that Dogbe encountered throughout her upbringing, Are You Coming To Church? is an online videogame exploring the development of selfhood across time through social connections, ancestry and spirituality.

The videogame invites players to explore environments that feature elements of religious architecture and secular community spaces, including traditional mosques, stained-glass windows, family kitchens and suburbs. Rendered from drawings of imagined sacred and residential sites into virtual 3D forms, each scene refers to the artist’s own cultural heritage and experiences of growing up in Ghana and the UK. The spaces are flooded with golden light and accompanied by an original soundscape conceived by Louis Jack and Ratiba Ayadi. This sonically transports players through digital time and space.

Are You Coming To Church? considers how the social environments around us impact our ideas of self. The players’ choices affect the video game’s narrative, which focuses on how cultures and experiences reveal our inherited connections to religion.

AMA DOGBE

Ama Dogbe is a British-Ghanaian artist whose work engages with a range of personal and societal themes through digital mediums including video games, digital animations and audio-visual installations. Her processes use self-taught and collaborative techniques to arrive at experimental and unconventional outcomes.

Dogbe has been commissioned by Modern Painters, Loughborough (2023), tiata fahodzi, Watford (2022), selected as digital artist in residence with Chisenhale Into The Wild, London (2023), and was a resident artist at BOM, Birmingham (2022). She has also exhibited with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art (2022), East Bristol Contemporary (2022) and Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (2021).