Adjo Kisser In her constellation of art projects Adjo Kisser seeks to make sense of drawing by expanding its possibilities with spoken narratives. The focus in this particular project is on sound and the creation of computer malware. The sound component is made up of audible but not readily intelligible narratives put together from bits and pieces of text, emanating from either subconscious sources or appropriated from posters, private messages and conversations between people. The text has been translated into Asante Twi and Hausa and spoken as overlays in a stand-alone audio recording performed by a selected group of people in Kumasi. The Red Flag series borrows from the character and ability of viruses or malware to spread by penetrating barriers, circles and closed groups in the digital domain. A malware which functions as a means of disseminating work in the form of gif images has been developed and it affects digital devices in its proximity. Elvis Nsiah Elvis Nsiah has brought together discarded objects gathered from states of precariousness and has fashioned them into three-dimensional structures, animated mechanically or electronically. Disused home utensils, corrugated metal sheets and plastic parts of machines are reconfigured into makeshift beings that gyrate, vibrate and emit bizarre sounds of forced use. With his sculptural objects, Nsiah continues to allude to the living and working conditions of the undocumented multitudes that inhabit the city without permits. Samiratu Abdulai Moro Inspired by the lives of aquatic animals, Samiratu Abdulai Moro has created I won’t selfish II, an installation made up of fish, shrimps, crabs and other sea and river dwelling organisms suspended in synthetic resin. This is the second in a series in which Moro restages the modus vivendi of aquatic animals, introducing them into non-familiar environs. The marine organisms are congealed in some sort of finitude simulating amber fossils. There is a semblance of jewels or precious stones when one encounters the work. Nicholas Ofori Nicholas Ofori reimagines portraiture in the Classical African sculpture canon. In this exhibition Ofori references Akan funerary heads. He models in clay and achieves a distinct object with each reproduction made from P.O.P mould by throwing the clay to the ground to deform the cast. The faux archeological objects are entombed with food left overs, salt and sugar to accelerate the decay process. Found objects such as square mesh nets and tree branches are also used in his installations. Akwasi Afrane Bediako In this exhibition, Bediako’s makeshift arcade machine— built from parts of a desktop computer — retunes old games into his own versions. He explores the world of videogames by revisiting early gaming hardware. With his improvised arcade machine, he retunes and modifies old Nintendo games and includes a repertoire of original classic games tuned by amateurs to offer different experiences which could either be nostalgic for old gamers or new for the current generation. Daniel Osei Poku Daniel Osei Poku’s grotesque installations of severed cattle horns, dried, exhumed, strung together, and decaying are growing horn moths that feed on its keratin. The cattle are transported from various parts of the Northern region of Ghana and subjected to brutal fates of butchery for a ready consumer market. The immanence of decaying and emerging life forms of the horns produce pungent smells. Elolo Bosoka The container becomes matter in Elolo Bosoka’s plastic and metal installations. Using charcoal sacks and rusted Tomato tins — tools used as measurements by market sellers —, he manipulates the materials by stripping, stretching, crumpling, cutting, burning, and hammering. Violently transformed into compositions, patchworks, and ghostly bodies, the packaging materials become objects of inquiry and instruction. Governed by synthetic grids that weave the sacks, and the vertical stripes that orient their direction, these new forms lead us into a deeper and darker void: holes made by fire, heads of empty shadows, charcoal-seeped crevices, and spaces between seams. His current projects deal with the idea of production, packaging, labor and the idea of creating communities in Ghanaian contemporary societies.
blaxTARLINES KUMASI and the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board Project Space for Contemporary Art
Message from the Executive Director Ghana Museums and Monuments Board The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) is proud to be associated with this exhibition themed: “Orderly Disorderly”. This institution has collaborated with KNUST on their end of year exhibitions since 2015, with our Museum of Science and Technology serving as proud partner and host all three consecutive times. The exhibition honours Ghanaian art icon, Ablade Glover and also presents projects developed by well over hundred artists, some of whom are young graduates, seasoned artists and this time too, a special space is given to the unknown artist. As abstract as the theme may appear, it gives an educational insight into novelties in the realm of the art of our time. We congratulate blaxTARLINES KUMASI for their exciting initiative and wish them the best in their future endeavours. We at the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board will continue to work with blaxTARLINES KUMASI, project space for contemporary art at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST to further the cause of art for posterity. Nana Nyarkua Ocran Deputy Director (GMMB) for Executive Director
“Orderly Disorderly” Curatorial Statement
Orderly Disorderly (2017) completes the trilogy of large scale end-of-year exhibitions held by blaxTARLINES KUMASI, the contemporary art incubator and project space of KNUST, in collaboration with Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) and its subsidiary, the Museum of Science and Technology (MST) in Accra. The exhibition features works by fresh graduates, alumni, and guest artists (living and dead). The previous two exhibitions — The Gown Must Go to Town… (2015) and Cornfields in Accra (2016) — honored Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and Ama Ata Aidoo respectively. “Cornfields” also honored the memory of Cameroonian conceptual artist Goddy Leye (1965-2011). Orderly Disorderly shares and celebrates the political vision of artist and educator Professor Ablade Glover who mobilized artists toward economic emancipation within a hopeless artistic milieu in the early 1990s when Ghana’s cultural institutions had been famished of domestic and international support. Intergenerational conversations, collective curating and accessibility programming are vital to the curatorial model adopted by blaxTARLINES KUMASI during this series of exhibitions. blaxTARLINES actively collaborates with GMMB and MST in programming and curating to incorporate artefacts in their permanent collection into its exhibitions. The terms of the exhibition trilogy were set by “Silence between the Lines” in 2015 based on a deliberate misreading of the Sankɔfa legend by karî’kạchä seid’ou. In this new reading, the Sankɔfa bird unfastens its customary anchor of nostalgia and “attempts to grasp what it might have forgotten from futures that are to come”. This summarizes the new spirit of the Kumasi Art School which would be interpreted as anagrams of emancipated futures. Orderly Disorderly combines the political attitudes and principles underlying Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s practice — notably The Bread and the Alley (1970), Orderly or Disorderly (1981) and The Chorus (1982) — and seid’ou’s emancipatory art pedagogy. Kiarostami is reputed for his deliberate use of non-actors and unprofessional crew to produce very significant films. His vital efforts to intervene in the film form saw him subvert conventions of filmmaking in order to transform and reinvent the medium. This spirit aligns with that which animates contemporary art production in the Department of Painting and Sculpture (KNUST, Kumasi). seid’ou’s egalitarian and emancipatory teaching practice “encourages student artists and other young artists to work in the spirit of finding alternatives to the bigger picture which excluded their voices but paradoxically by first becoming an anamorphic stain in the bigger picture itself.” This typifies his politics of ironic overidentification. With this background the exhibition reflects on the status of art in the early decades of the 21st century. The exhibition posits art as a site of multiplicity. Art that is de-substantialized and emerges from a void: a state of indifference that is not pre-emptively prejudicial to any particular medium, content, skill, material, trend or process. If anything can be said to be art today it must necessarily be invented. There are important analogies to be drawn from the artistic and political indifference espoused by the curatorial team of Orderly Disorderly, and the state of hopelessness and indifference experienced by sufferers and witnesses of the current global crises of public commons (refugee crisis, economic precarity, threats of ecological crisis in the epoch of anthropocene, new forms of apartheid emerging as invisible walls in the public sphere, gentrification of digital space and intellectual property, etc). As a response, the exhibition features a generic participant, ‘The Unknown Artist’. This character embodies the void, the disavowed, which haunts the consistency of exhibition projects operating within the finitude of contemporary capitalist processes but disavowing the precarity they leave behind.
Orderly Disorderly countenances diverse multi-site projects extending from MST into the city of Accra and further into virtual spaces — straddling human-centered and posthuman, art and non-art practices alike — by over 90 artists, including seminars, outreach programs, art talk events and a body of archives of the Kumasi School among which are manuscripts of poems authored by Uche Okeke. The exhibition invites its audience to deal with the contradictions that are constitutive of their everyday lives.
Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and blaxTARLINES Curatorial Team, June 2017.
Credits Participating Artists (BFA 2017, selected): Mawuenya B. K. Amudzi; Praises Adu Benhene; Esther Anokye; Paul Sagoe & Felicia Oduro (Collective); Andrews Kpakpo Allotey; Larry Adorkor; Emmanuel Arhin; Eurica Ansah; John Ofosu Mensah; Richmond Amo-Appiah; Larry Akumah; Abraham Nsoh Abene; Amanda Agyekum; Samuel Baah Kortey; Ama Sefa; Yvonne Akweley Nortey; Prosper Setsoafia; Angelina Mensah; Benjamin Safo; Eberhard Ofori; Bernice Dzifa Djokoto; David Agbeko; Eugene Mensah; Jeffrey Owusu Peprah; Ernest Frimpong; Grace Gbedife; Yeboah Aboagye Dacosta; Nana Yaw Asare Bediako; Fredrick Nii Noi Botchway; Tracy Thompson; Priscilla Kennedy; Asiedu William; Rosemary Esinam Damalie; Elikem Quist; Prince Oduro; Caleb Prah; Lydia Mensah; Georgina Fynn; Francis Nii Addo Quaye; Jeffrey Amoako; Earl Davis; Kevin Abankwah; Percy Nii Nortey; Nuna Adisenu-Doe; Olympio Romildo; Daniel Mensah; Henry Ofori; Bernice Ameyaw; Vincent Mensah; Andrews McCarthy; Sandra Adu Agyeiwaa; Mary Dame; Ameen Farouk Ameen; Abena Agyapomaa; Emmanuel Abalo; Prince Owusu Bempah; King George Yeboah; Michael Akuoko. Alumni: Daniel Osei Poku; Akwasi Afranie Bediako; Nicholas Ofori; Samiratu Moro Abdulai; Elvis Nsiah; Adjo Kisser; Elolo Bosoka; Theresah Ankomah; Silas Mensah; Livingstone Amoako; Geoffrey Akpene Biekro (Captain’s Kitchen); Kelvin Haizel; William Ekow Duku; Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi; Benjamin Okantey; Henry Obeng; Jonathan Okoronkwo; Lois Arde-Acquah; Kwame Asante Agyare; Adwoa Konadu Antwi Boasiako; Samuel Boateng; Edward Buxton; Armiyaw Suleman; Shimawuda Ziorkley; Makafui Gadikor; Simon Bowman Jnr.; Frank Kofi Gyabeng. Special Guest Artists: Ablade Glover; Sylvanus Kwami Amenuke; Patrick Tagoe-Turkson; Kwabena Afriyie Poku; Eugene Edzorho; Afia Prempeh Sarpong; Bright Ackwerh; Dorothy Akpene Amenuke; Edwin Bodjawah; Ibrahim Mahama; Agyeman Ossei; Kofi Winston Galle Dawson; Gideon Appah; Deryk Owusu Bempah; Selasi Awusi Sosu; Dickson Artoqui; K.K. Broni; The Unknown artist.
Curatorial Team
Artistic Directors: kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, George Ampratwum. Curator: Bernard Akoi-Jackson; Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (IUB); Mavis Tetteh-Ocloo; Selom Kudjie; Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah Guest Curators: Kofi Adjei, Kezia Owusu-Ankomah. Media and Publicity: Alvin Ashiatey; Nana Osei Kwadwo; Mardey Ohui Ofoe; Rosemary Esinam Damalie; Henry Ofori; Selasi Awusi Sosu; Daniel Mensah (Sky Scraper); Awuni Mustapha; Nuna Adisenu-Doe; Elikem Va-Bene Fiatsi; Percy Nii Nortey; Percy Duncan; John Owoo. Advisory Team Edwin Bodjawah; Michael Adashie; Kwame Opoku Bonsu, Eyram Donkor; Felix Annor Anim; Mantey Jectey-Nyarko Exhibition Construction: John Aganda; Francis Djiwornu; Elvis Nsiah; Elolo Bosoka; Benjamin Okantey; Joshua Glorkpor; Mawuenya Amudzi; Issah Alhassan. Catering: Geoffrey Biekro and Captain’s Kitchen, Adwoa Ntiamoah, Adelaide Dadzie. Transport: Kennedy Esiaw Security MST/GMMB Security Staff: WO 1 George Partey (Chief Security); Samuel Agbenyo; Issaka Sofo Sumaila; Augustine Hayibor; John Asoore; Emmanuel Amanor; Akudingba Amoah
MST/GMMB Grounds and Sanitation Staff: Patience Owusuwaa; Agnes Asaah; Azimi Agadama Bila; Kojo Asaketikor; Daniel Asorkor Organizers: blaxTARLINES KUMASI team. Collaborating Institutions: Ghana Museums and Monuments Board; Museum of Science and Technology, Accra; Department of Theater Arts, UG, Legon; Foundation for Contemporary Art, Ghana (FCA); The Studio, Accra Special Guests: Ama Ata Aidoo; Prof. Kwasi Obiri-Danso (The Vice Chancellor, KNUST); Prof. Ablade Glover Special Guest of Honour: Prof. El Anatsui Support: Mrs. Naana Ocran (GMMB); Mahmoud Malik Saako (MST); Edwin Bodjawah; Kofi Winston Gale Dawson; Dorothy Amenuke; Michael Adashie; Gilbert Amegatcher; Kwabena Afriyie Poku; Kwame Opoku Bonsu; Ibrahim Mahama; Sandra Bruku (GMMB); Ato Annan; Adwoa Amoah; Openemma Productions; Abdul Karim Hakib (Department of Theater Arts, UG, Legon); William Gmayi Nsuiban (GMMB); Eric Nana Fredua (MST); Kofi Buanya-Mensah (MST); Theo Annor Adetu (Artists’ Alliance Gallery, Accra); Staff of GMMB and MST; Mrs. Agnes Broni and Estate of K. K. Broni Legal Consultants: Reuben Agbelengor Glover; Dennis Aryeetey Funding: Friends of blaxTARLINES and Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST. Contact: Bernard +233(0)242858977. Adjo +233(0)209936860, Mavis +233(0)501362357 for more information.
Participating Artists The Unknown Artist This generic participant marks the ineluctable site of exception which haunts art projects operating within the finitude of capitalist processes. On the one hand, this participant delineates alienation that comes with exploited labor: invested bodies whose vital contributions go unaccounted for and remain unnamed, unmarked and/or unidentified akin to the “Unknown Soldier”. On the other hand, this participant also defines the excesses without which the content is incomplete. It is the element that cannot be accounted for but which at the same time is what brings everything in its context into perspective. Orderly Disorderly comes to terms with such contradictions of our time. For Jorge Luis Borges “a book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete”. Professor Ablade Glover Professor Ablade Glover is a Ghanaian educator and modernist painter. He was Professor and Head of the Department of Art Education and Dean of the College of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, until 1994. His political vision of mobilizing artists towards economic emancipation in the early 1990s in a milieu of hopelessness has inspired blaxTARLINES KUMASI. The exhibition honors Professor Glover’s lifework, dubbed Order in Disorder, an idea he keeps returning to in all stages of his artistic development. Dickson Artoqui Dickson Artoqui is a horticulturalist who is currently experimenting with and growing strawberries in Ghana, which has a climate that does not support their growth. When asked, “how do you do it” he says ‘I simply give them love and attention and spend a lot of time studying them. Selasi Awusi Sosu Selasi Sosu’s work explores mysteries in the aesthetics of glass. In her new series titled Glass factory, she investigates the shutting down and consequent abandonment of Tropical Glass Company in Ghana (formerly Abosso Glass Company — hitherto a vibrant glass manufacturing company supplying bottles for the beverage industry in Ghana and beyond) in 1993. Video, sound and installation are her mediums of expression. She makes videos of glass objects that mimic movement in the assembly line, some rotating and in different configurations which are then converted to 3D hologram videos.
Kingsley Kofi Broni Kingsley Kofi “K.K” Broni, studied at Gyamase Presbyterian Primary and Middle School and completed his Standard Seven Education in 1958. Broni’s art career formally began when he met Mr David Dobson, a Scottish sculptor from the Royal College of Art who was the Head of the College of Art at the then Kumasi College of Technology, now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Broni’s professional career as a ceramicist spans over Thirty (30) years of successful practice. Between 1972 and 1974 Broni left Britain for the United States, precisely the University of California, Berkley for his Master of Arts Degree in Design which he completed in 1974. At Berkley he learned to experiment with sea shells and fossils and absorbed the formal influences of aquatic life. The shift from utilitarian to sculptural forms and his shift from the potters wheel, the area of his greatest strength, was at first disorienting. But it was during this vulnerable time that Broni found his own unique creative voice. Upon his return to Ghana, Broni left behind the strict functional parameters of the [David] Leach and [Micheal] Cardew tradition to produce uniquely Modern African ceramics. His work was informed by western modern expressive approaches rooted in Ghanaian tradition and culture. Deryk Owusu Bempah For this particular project, Deryk Owusu Bempah has dropped his professional camera and depended solely on his smartphone to take photographs of details of random architectural structures in Accra and Tema. Since the smartphone platform can be limiting in comparison to digital cameras, there is very minimal manipulation to the image that is produced. Lighting, contrasts, framing and angles are all determined in situ. Owusu Bempah seems to induce attitudes from the era of analogue photography into the current reel of things. Gideon Appah Gideon Appah’s Memoirs through Pokua’s Windows is a series of works comprising paper collages on canvas, collage drawings and object assemblages. These items are collected from old homes in Accra. Appah believes the historical memories embedded within the relics merit documentation and preservation in a society that is fast evolving. Kofi Winston Galle Dawson Kofi Winston Galle Dawson is part of an early generation of Ghanaian artists to graduate from KNUST in the 1960s. After attaining his Bachelor’s degree in Art, he travelled to Slade School in the UK for a short study programme under Professor William Coldstream of the Euston Road School. This was part of a British Council technical award which lasted for eight months. His early paintings were a blend of exceptional draughtsmanship with a colourful postimpressionistic aesthetic. His works make use of multiple media that bring together different techniques, genres and materials. Printing was another means of self-expression. Early print works were etched. Later works were silk screen prints comprised of simple lines made over blocks of bright coloured background. For most of his life, he’s lived in Nima – Accra, a place which became material for his Afro-journalistic study-drawings and writings of a fast growing and changing community. Agyeman Ossei Agyeman Ossei’s cross-disciplinary practice attempts a linkage of the symbolic, semiotic and metaphysical in art. He dialogically relates painting, collage and sculpture as mediums of expanding Asante linguistic proverbial and philosophical ideas. His works celebrate cultural classics (literature, poetry, etc) and memorializes them through carving, modeling, painting and dramaturgy. He has translated and adapted literary works into theatre plays: notably “The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born” and “Osiris Rising” by the poet, novelist and scholar Ayi Kwei Armah. Ibrahim Mahama Ibrahim Mahama is an independent artist who has been interested in the material history of objects in relation to space. Jute sacks originally used in transporting Cocoa (and later used for charcoal and other commodities) that have been acquired through negotiations, conversations and exchanges in market places are superimposed on various sites which raise aesthetic and political questions. For his contribution to Orderly Disorderly, Mahama presents a two-channel video installation titled EXCHANGE-EXCHANGER (1957-2057) which explores the relationship between labor and architecture. His work has been shown in both the 56th and 57th Venice Biennale, documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), The Gown Must Go to Town (2015), Cornfields in Accra (2016), and White Cube Gallery in London. Edwin Bodjawah The face masks Edwin Bodjawah [re]produces are made from decommissioned lithographic plates from the Ghanaian print industry and corrugated roofing sheets as well as other objects and materials appropriated from building sites. Borrowing from multi-layered processes embedded in African masking systems and their theatrical role in social life, Bodjawah improvises with techniques of mechanical reproduction, similar to industrial embossment and stamping. This nominalist gesture reclaims the African mask from the white cube gallery system — a colonial apparatus which flattens it into an autonomous object to be contemplated by a disembodied eye — and [re]infuses the new forms with collective processes of production and spectatorship.
Dorothy Akpene Amenuke Dorothy Akpene Amenuke’s fabric and fibre objects disrupt given expectations about sculpture. They are formed through laborious sessions in which a community of family, students and friends work with her. Amenuke’s A cloth of Tools in Orderly Disorderly is a two sided piece made from cotton fabric, jute fibre with raw cotton fillings. The piece is a play on the idea of the ‘tool box’. On a closer look, the lesions and puffed areas on the surface of the worked fabric refer vaguely to a variety of tools in Amenuke’s studio. But of what use are podgy, pallid and limp tools? Bright Ackwerh Bright Ackwerh’s satirical illustrations appropriate narratives from popular culture to make socio-political commentaries. He exaggerates popular iconic personalities into cartoon characters who metaphorically become archetypes of broader attitude traits of just anybody. He critiques scathingly and praises lavishly. The commentary itself borrows wittingly from a myriad of sources, these transform his illustrations into whole episodes. The narrative situations may require some assistance to navigate, since they are mostly imbued with double, if not triple entendres. His work also engages subtly with the phenomenon of public poster making and display. Afia Prempeh Sarpong For Orderly Disorderly, Afia Prempeh paints portraits of prominent figures and landscapes that deal with religious themes. Prempeh’s process involves staging photography of her subjects and inventing landscapes and sceneries. She employs the extra-painterly technique of montaging images collected from random sources — magazines, internet, etc — into her compositions). Eugene Edzorho Eugene Edzorho has remained committed to exploring sites of irreversible disorder; places which cannot be returned to their former state after they have been traumatized by extractive activities like mining, quarrying or even logging. From these sites, he collects rocks and stones with which he creates composite geometric forms suspended on nylon lines. The rocks have either been expelled from the bowels of the earth or washed from riverbeds at Galamsey sites. The otherwise heavy stone hangings appear impossibly weightless. Kwabena Afriyie Poku Borrowing from systems of martial arts training, Kwabena Afriyie Poku’s three screen video installation with sound presents a test of the practitioner’s sense of space. What are the options when one only has the thickness of a fence wall or the rectangular limits of a raised concrete platform to balance on? Art and martial arts Katas come into graceful conversation in the light of indiscriminate destruction and unjustified instant justice. Patrick Tagoe-Turkson Patrick Tagoe-Turkson’s work alludes to time-honoured art practices like traditional flag making, that link approaches of contemporary art creation to belief systems. His work involves drawing, painting, mixed media, performance, video and sculpture. In Dialogue, a collaboration between Patrick Tagoe-Turkson (Ghana) and Eross Istvan (Hungary), food as a common denominator among humans becomes a humorous means by which to allegorize individual and collective struggles. Dr. Sylvanus Kwami Amenuke uliana Asare Dr. Sylvanus Kwami Amenuke was born in Akoefe in the Volta Region in 1940. He entered Mawuli in 1954 till 1958. For a while, he taught Art, Ewe and Geography at Peki Secondary. In 1965 he taught Art, Ewe, Geography and Science at Awudome Secondary School and left for College of Art, KNUST to study art. In Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Amenuke won the Mobil Oil Ghana Ltd. Award for the best painting (1970) and the Grace True Blood (American) Award for the best work of art. He graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Painting (1970). He was awarded the Hays Fulbright International Scholarship, USA for Graduate Studies. He obtained the Master of Fine Art Degree in Painting in 1972 from Kent State University, Ohio, USA and continued to the University of Connecticut, Ohio USA, where he obtained the Doctor of Education in Art Education Degree, specializing in Visual Art, Curriculum Development. At his graduation in Connecticut, Amenukes’s citation described him as an: “Emissary of Ghana and a Genius who appears on the scene quietly and disappears”. Dr. Amenuke has rendered curriculum services in Visual Arts to the Curriculum Research and Development Division of GES from 1983 to 2007. He was chairman and leader of various curriculum panels to develop Teaching Syllabuses for Kindergarten, Primary and Senior High Schools. Dr. Amenuke served on the National Planning Committee for the implementation of school reforms (1987 – 1992), representing the interest of Visual Arts. He has rendered External Examination services in Visual Arts to the University of Education, Winneba since 1982. Dr. S.K. Amenuke has produced several Visual Arts Teachers at the Masters Degree level and eighteen (18) PhD graduates who teach in Ghanaian Universities and Polytechnics. Dr. Amenuke has made singular and dedicated contributions to Education in Visual Arts in Ghana, but goes quietly unnoticed by many.
Kofi Adjei Kofi Adjei is a lecturer and a practising artist who has dedicated his research to the life and work of K.K Broni. He teaches Ceramics at the Industrial Art Department, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He holds MFA Ceramics and is currently pursuing his PhD in African Art and Culture at KNUST. His research interests include: Ceramics mixed media, Aesthetics and Criticism, Materials and methods in ceramics production, ornamentation in architecture and Indigenous pottery production in Ghana. Adjei has published in both local and international journals in the areas of ceramics mixed media, ceramics raw materials, and traditional art and culture. Adjei has held several exhibitions in galleries, hotels and private homes in Ghana. Romildo Olympio Olympio paints moments in martial art moves and stances in his sharp contrasting black and white pictures. He photographs himself and his karate colleagues and appropriates images of other martial art stars such as Hung li, Cung Lea and Alexandra Recchia. These paintings of martial art stances seem to be made out of screen printing, but have been painted by Romildo. A careful rendition of these paintings are reminiscent of the dedicated constant repetition and practice he and others go through in the study of martial arts to attain mastery of their moves. Mawuenya B. K. Amudzi Mawuenya Amudzi creates installations from disused cathode ray tube (CRT) television screens and computer monitors. His process involves taking photographs of activities in the scrap yards and repairer workshops, where he collects the materials, and transferring these images on transparent stickers onto the screens creating image objects. He joins the objects with metallic bolts, nuts and binding wire, animating them with light fixtures, to compose his monumental installations. Light emissions from the monitors through the images gives the form a theatrical quality. Praises Adu Benhene Praises Adu Benhene’s damp decommissioned clothes — folded, stacked, hanged, cast in p.o.p — collected from illegal mining sites and car fitting shops are presented in sculptural and installation form. Not only do they embody a presence of things in decay but also of materials frozen in time and of things that are becoming. The clothes that have been preserved in their natural state with accumulation of dirty oil stains, sweat and dust have molds/mildew/ fungi growths on them. The works emit smells resonant of decay and emerging life forms. Esther Ama Agyemang Anokye Tree branches, clay, square wire meshes, nails, and metal binding wires come together to compose Esther Anokye’s imagined landscapes inspired by children’s uninhibited drawings. Her clay is left unfired. Her three-dimensional drawings in clay are made by spreading, pressing, throwing and sprinkling on the objects. As time acts on the clay it dries; the cracks that emerge become nature’s own drawing marks. Paul Sagoe & Felicia Oduro (Collective) The Oduro-Sagoe pair produces objects inspired by “alien” forms as well as the aesthetics of electrical wiring systems. Their mechanized assemblages are made from aluminum cans, metal rods, anal bulb syringes, parts of stoves, shower heads, etc. through processes such as welding, gluing and binding. Their fantastical forms are animated by electrically- or battery-powered motors and are set with functions such as vibration and rotation. Their electrical cable installations incorporate dysfunctional meter boards, PVC pipes, switch boxes, and distribution boards. Andrews Kpakpo Allotey: Andrews Kpakpo Allotey creates fabrications from plastics, enamel basins, woks, aluminum buckets and other metals collected from head porters, scrap sites, food sellers and homes. His work explores economic concepts such as trade and labor. Apart from existing in the matrix of everyday commercial activities and capital exchanges, the objects he repurposes directly appropriate emblems from corporate and traffic iconography. Allotey’s installations fictionalize the everyday as it is known. Larry Adorkor Larry Adorkor’s pseudo-ethnographic process involves collecting objects of material culture from various townships in Kumasi. He learns from the social interactions and systems that characterize his sites of interest and imports them into his display strategies: for example, Adorkor’s installations engage the spectator beyond contemplation to taste foods and interact with board games. By appropriating museum systems of preservation, archiving and displaying cultural objects, Adorkor raises the question of how the white cube space or ideology potentially alienates [cultural] objects from social interactions.
Emmanuel Arhin Emmanuel Arhin, through processes of cutting, drilling, and wiring, builds installations with skinned coconut shells. He punches holes in the shells and attaches them together by sewing with banding wire onto an armature that assumes a gigantic headless reptilian form. Eurica Ansah Eurica Ansah scales up sophisticated computer systems into exaggerated sculptures carved in wood. Using the hacksaw, power sander, lathe turner, and various kinds of wood cut offs, he creates intricate sculptures mimicking computer motherboards set with CPU sockets, video card, memory and expansion slots. Daniel Mensah Daniel Mensah views his paintings as an articulation of variance in dealing with one strand pulled from Hip-Hop culture, that is graffiti. With this visual medium, he takes Hip-Hhop as subject matter, and highlights its transculture potential. His work touches on the codes and languages developed with this culture. He also adapts certain inscriptions around. His oeuvre takes the form of murals or installations. The work is spread on walls, canvases, roofing sheets and metal as an installation or a mural. John Ofosu Mensah John Ofosu Mensah has made a selection of clay, wooden and metallic cooking utensils from kitchens across the city of Kumasi via exchange. These are welded or assembled into installations that evoke an idea of molecular structures. As Ofosu Mensah exchanges new utensils for old and weathered ones, they come into similar kinds of conversation that he holds with the people from whom he collects them. Smoke, soot and wood ash become drawing media that act on some of the pots, replicating wall cracks and worn out poster patterns. Richmond Amoh-Appiah With notions of coloniality and post-coloniality as points of departure, Richmond Amoh-Appiah has fabricated quirky metallic objects in the semblance of colonialist weaponry. What seem to be cannons, big guns and dangerous artillery are in actuality parodies. As the public approaches them, the weapons take aim, but instead of cannon balls, bullets or missiles, what explodes out of the barrels are videos and sound pieces made from archival material sourced from national and private archives. They hurl us back into times past, to shake up complacent attitudes towards history. Larry Akuma Larry Akuma’s multi-media work brings together traditional clay modelling techniques, experimental elements of sound as well as live growing plants into an enthralling installation. Over a huge armature of iron rods and chicken wire, Akuma has modelled his interpretations of mythical characters; Kweku Ananse (protagonist of a lot of Akan folktales) and two other characters, Akokɔ and Akrɔma in clay. A miscellany of grasses, plants and weeds sprout form cracks within the unfired clay bodies of the beings. They are engulfed in a cloud of sound comprising contemporary renditions of folkloric music from many cultures. Akuma’s gesture brings fantasies and fictions of the dream world to the physical space and invites us back into the enchantments that childhood can permit. Abraham Nsoh Abene Abraham Nsoh Abene re-interprets urban myths and folklore using simple silhouette and shadow animation techniques. In this make-shift studio installation, Abene’s entire work station, including mechanized animation components operated by battery powered dynamos, an electric sewing machine pedal, paper cut outs mounted on cotton fabric screens or in a bamboo canoe, grass, twigs, organic and inorganic materials become players in a theatre of interactivity. Amanda Asieduwaah Agyekum Indigenous Akan architectural friezes, murals, Fante Asafo flag imagery and textile symbols are the primary sources from which Amanda Asieduwaah Agyekum taps inspiration. She makes embroideries in tapestry thread on pieces of leather. These are then collaged onto synthetic rubber backings (Macro board). They adorn interior and exterior spaces as chromatic murals, friezes or titillating objects. Samuel Baah Kortey Samuel Baah Kortey’s humanoid drawings on decaying plywood appropriate postures from classical paintings merged with iconography from popular culture and technology. His work is an assemblage of fictional characters composed of human and insect parts merged with mechanical objects. Kortey draws with animal blood collected from the Kumasi Abattoir. His interest in the symbiotic relationship existing between the life and death of animals leads him to exacerbate the decay of the plywood by burying it after drawing, for termites and other insects to act on the work.
Ama Antwiwaa Sefa Ama Antwiwaa Sefa has laboriously taken plaster of Paris casts of the inner spaces of items of second-hand clothing and accessories (bags, shoes, braziers), that many women from the lower economic classes tend to use. The items have been garnered from communities spread all over the city of Kumasi, some being very intimate objects like sanitary pads. Sefa reverses the roles of the inner spaces by bringing them out into the open. In doing so, she raises questions about privacy and propriety. Henry Ofori The idea of taking ‘selfies’, a now common social practice associated with objects of telecommunication and social media, is the starting point of Ofori’s work. He collects pictures of friends from various social media platforms. After painting the portraits, they are sent to those whose pictures were requested. The paintings are executed in layers within Photoshop and then merged. He outlines the images in black and slightly manipulates them by using the dodge and burn tools. Yvonne Akweley Nortey Using varieties of saw dust gathered from woodwork studios and carpentry workshops in Anloga Junction, Sokoban and Oforikrom in Kumasi, and sprinkled upon a base of polyvinyl acetate, (PVA) glue, Yvonne Akweley Nortey simulates the look and feel of leather, emery cloth and even human skin. The resultant delicate objects she makes present both glossy and matte surface qualities and hang in free space, inviting physical interaction. Prosper Setsoafia Setsoafia’s quasi-archeological process involves casting objects (parts of game pads, discarded radios, domestic lanterns, etc) in P.O.P mixed with palm kernel cake and artificially aging them by entombing with iron filings which oxidize the casts into brownish-red faux fossil objects. This controlled process highlights Setsoafia’s interest in rethinking the relationship between objects of material culture and time. Angelina Asare Mensah Angelina Asare Mensah basically appropriates personal objects which have been used over a period of time, fashioning them into vaguely familiar clusters and groupings. The objects she selects may have been discarded and foraged from repairers at market places, or collected from friends and associates. The materials (objects) she works with may be considered as symbolically charged with use and some history (even if recent or imagined). The naughty wit that permeates Asare Mensah’s work is subtly disarming and confronts our most hidden fantasies and desires. Benjamin Sarfo Benjamin Sarfo appropriates aesthetics of West African masking traditions to invent his own forms. He casts masks in Beeswax as a gesture of assigning value to the objects. He appropriates masks from Baluba and Dogon traditions. These are given a personal twist and presented as though in an ethnographic display. Eberhard Ofori Eberhard Ofori’s craft of experimenting with leather manipulates the material by sanding, gluing, tying, soaking, stretching and dying. The dyes leave amorphous stains or patterns on the leather and the leather assumes the form of the object onto which it is draped in its wet state before drying. Bernice Dzifa Djokoto Djokoto has made a series of plaster casts treated to resemble beads of all sorts. They are strung together into objects that mimic prayer beads from many world traditions. There is revelation, upon an intimate examination of the individual beads that they are heads severed from unknown bodies. To facilitate the stringing, Djokoto has drilled holes through the ears of the heads, a potentially violent act that she perpetrates as a means of critiquing the power of indoctrination that religious fanaticism or the misinterpretation of world religions inflicts onto people and societies. David Comrade Sedi Agbeko David Agbeko simulates coprolite (fossilized dinosaur feces), human, cat, goat, lizard, and cow poop with a mixture of gari (grated cassava), water and acrylic paint through techniques such as squeezing, modeling and painting. He then uses highly concentrated Cherry Cereza air freshners and concentrated Vanilla flavoring (sometimes used for making ice cream and other confectionary) as a lure to emphasize the irony between the visual form of the work and its pleasant smell. His scatological obsession uses fecal forms as both stimulus and decoy for audience engagement.
Eugene Mensah Eugene Mensah allows kids between the ages of five to ten from different social classes to draw on sheets of paper. He scans the drawings and digitally recomposes them. Out of these, he creates zines in the guise of childrens’ school books. His installation simulates class room settings and invites the younger public especially, to interact with objects which may be all too familiar. Abena Agyapomaa Manga characters, Kente patterns, and a rocket that is launched into space are some of the images stitched onto the same plane despite the fact that they are from different spaces and times. The palimpsest of images are just one of the characteristics of Abena’s work. She makes these out of varied checkered bags popularly known as”Ghana must Go Bags”, patterned plastic carpets and fabric. Jefferey Owusu Peprah Peprah continues to explore sounds emanating from the insides of bodies which could be overlooked in daily experiences — heartbeats of humans and chicken amongst others. He has recently began experiments with consumable products like bread. He does this by harvesting sounds produced throughout the slow transformation of leaven dough into its ready state for baking. The sound is recorded with a stethoscope connected to a computer using the sound editing software, Audacity. Ernest Frimpong Ernest Frimpong has sourced sound samples from live church services, lorry stations, schools and saw-mill workshops and has “re-woven” them digitally into a collage which becomes the background for rap. Frimpong performs the rap verses himself in Asante Twi. The sound collages with their attendant rap commentaries become portraits that resonate with the sonorous vibrancy of the various suburbs of cities across the country. Grace Gbedife The digital prints of Gbedife’s are photographic images of female traders in market spaces. She works on these images in Photoshop by rendering the bodies of her figures in a cartoon-like quality finishing them with her customized masks. The masks serve as mediators between the traders and consumers yet separate these two groups. And in the experience of the work, the viewer occupies this position as consumer. The activities are set on a wallpaper floating in an undefined space. Yeboah Aboagye Dacosta Aboagye Da Costa combines old master painting interests with the ‘selfie’ phenomenon prevalent in contemporary life. He paints full body portraits of plus-sized women who seem very much to be at home with their weight. In contrast to models in old master paintings, Da Costa’s models assume some of the poses of so called “slay queens”. All the models are seen grimacing, contorting and casting flirtatious glances to their numerous potential admirers on social media platforms, represented by the smartphones that they carry. Nana Yaw Asare Bediako Bediako’s works revolve around the idea of chance through the lottery system. He appropriates aesthetics of lotto kiosks, boards and writing styles. These are influenced by medieval manuscripts and placed within borders also influenced by medieval aesthetics. The work is printed on transparent sticker. The second phase of his working process involves the use of tickets and carbon papers which are organized on lotto journals. The resultant collage is mounted on black boards. He also constructs wooden structures from members he collects from derelict lotto kiosks. Fredrick Nii Noi Botchway In the recent works, Botchway developed his landscape vocabulary by colliding photography, printing and painting. Photographs taken of slums are manipulated in photo editing softwares to generate renditions in black and white. This is achieved by lessening saturation, enhancing contrast, brightness and blurring some portions. The images are printed on vanguard sheets, and coated in layers of oil paint diluted with vegetable cooking oil. The monochromatic works exist in varied tones. In others, the monotony of their subdued palettes is disturbed with occasional patches of more saturated colours. Bernice Ameyaw Bernice Ameyaw taps inspiration from geological phenomena and formations and simulates them. Employing concepts of Bricolage, she creates objects that are lavishly besmeared, if not totally drenched in bitumen. Embedded within the surface of the objects are an assortment of auto-mechanical parts, bolts, nuts, rubber tubing, metal shavings and other odds and ends assembled or bought from car spare parts dealers at Suame-Magazine, Asafo and Aboabo, suburbs of Kumasi. The objects become emblematic time capsules through which the city as a subject may be revealed.
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson Some kind of dripping liquid from the ceiling of the Museum of Science and Technology is frozen in motion; frozen gooey drips at the entrance of the building. What is happening? What are these things? They are only old friends— petrol and styrofoam — who have come to say “hi”. Tracy Thompson work for Orderly Disorderly dissolves styrofoam in its parent, petrol, to generate these rigid-gooey forms. What drives her interest is how such an opaque polypropylene can have varied transparencies and bubbly effects when it comes into contact with petrol; a material that was birthed out of years of geological pressures and G-forces of the earth to the point of that our organic kinship with it seems forgotten. Priscilla Kennedy Priscilla Kennedy works serially. Earlier, she created a series in which one could see a little touch of craft in the sense that different coloured strands of synthetic hair were woven into Islamic male scarves called Keffiyeh in Arabic. The main aim of this particular series was to specifically subvert a symbol or notion of patriarchy. Her more recent series consists of directly painting erotic female silhouettes onto the Keffiyeh, Kente prints and other fabrics. This take a jab at the social stereotype that women are tools of seduction. Another series made up of erotic embroideries also seeks to question the paradoxes of difference based on binary relations. How might we in the contemporary experience give concrete definitions to the binary distinctions of femininity and masculinity or art and craft? Even though the materials may easily be representative of a specific religion and femininity, they are recognized by the artist here as materials with less regards to their religious or, perhaps, sexist functions. William Asiedu After studying different versions of floor plans from construction sites in Kumasi, William Asiedu reconstructs dystopian architectural models in chipboard, wrapped in cement bags. Asiedu chooses cement brands that are most popular on the Ghanaian market (Ghacem, Dangote and Diamond). The strategy he adopts for showing his models is a witty misquotation of serious architectural maquette display. He also develops psuedo-scientific approaches to presenting wall legends that accompany his models. Asiedu’s body of work becomes a celebration of the spirit of freedom and potential that characterizes the urban built environment. Rosemary Esinam Damalie Rosemary Esinam Damalie’s process is laborious. She adopts visual cues from hair salons in the city to create intriguing object clusters and stand-alone sculptures which spill out of tacky glass vitrines, wind around plinths or climb into museum display vitrines. Damalie evokes a sense of intimacy by attaching accessories like hair ties, clips and even earrings, beads, safety pins onto her objects. The ‘bling’ on these ‘wannabe’ treasures invite us to take a closer look or maybe even touch them. Elikem Kofi Quist Quist’s work is characterized by a satirical take on critical issues in history or current events. The ever-present popular culture in our milieu resonates in the cartoon medium and its implied graphic aesthetics. His images are painted in flat colours with characters that bear emoticons indexing the evolution of language. The works are executed as Graphics Interchange Formats (GIF) for electronic media and then also as prints when reproduced digitally. Prince Oduro Prince Oduro is engaged in some sort of visual social commentary with a very humorous, if not scathing bent. He casts a critical glance at social, political and religious issues within Ghana primarily. Inspired by the elements of parody and satire that is characteristic of local highlife lyrics, Oduro animates some of the urban myths, rumors and gossips he hears by reconstructing them visually as multi-layered collage compositions, using paper, papier maché on acrylic painted teak plywood. He chooses teak because it is a very hard and robust wood. His subject is usually very current and immediate; the characters that populate his pictures may be acquaintances or public figures caught up in some sort of scandal. Their situations are presented in oddly familiar ways that can be uncomfortable and endearing in equal measure. Caleb Prah Caleb Prah’s photographic tableaux, inspired by medieval stained glass windows, is a staged composition of subjects haloed by baskets (objects of their profession) symmetrically facing each other. The portraits are printed on flex, framed with aluminum and glass. Other portraits are printed on decommissioned booths of commercial vans (Trotro).
Georgina Fynn Universes within universes; constellations made to seem immediate and palpable; are some of the few things that makes us keep our gaze at Georgina’s work. We wonder whether all of these are copies of real constellations or rather of parallel universes that have been rendered using tie-dye techniques on banal materials such as stiff and brown paper. Her rendering comes out of an indeterminate dyeing process and folding of brown paper and stiff onto various mold, which can end up looking like a tree or a rock of a sort. It reminds us that although we are different we share chemical bonds with the stars. Lydia Mensah Lydia Mensah’s interest in paper making began with a simple thought “Why can’t we produce paper out of the plants and shrubs we see around?” And this has led to a traditional hand production of undulating; fraying; differenly textured and large sized papers of different tensile strengths and densities which do not resemble the papers we are used to. The sheets are made from fibers such as plantain trees, guinea grass, bamboo and elephant grass that are harvested, cut into pieces, cooked till their fibers soften, washed and pounded. She also creates added textures by stamping, embedding or embossing. The plants are chosen because of their generous amount of cellulose fibre and the distinct colours they possess. Her sheets of varied colours and densities make way for a play of light; while our nasal cavities are wafted with traces of the smell of the fibres which have undergone a transformation leaving us with a multilayered encounters. Francis Nii Addo Quaye Francis Nii Addo Quaye’s video montages sequence images of old posters on derelict architectural structures, advertising boards, notices, etc, dubbed with sounds recorded from radio and from the streets of James Town in Accra. Quaye’s video editing technique of ‘videomoshing’ images, audios and texts into a sequence achieves the effect of bombardment commenting on urban societies where one is constantly barraged with aural, image and textual information. Jeffery Amoako Jeffery Amoako creates crystaline objects out of caramelized sugar, in a speculative scientific experiment. The nucleation process which catalyzes the speedy growth of the crystals is achieved by dipping a rope into syrup and sprinkling grains of sugar unto it. He then adds synthetic dyes. These crystals are in a state of becoming into new fictions of material. Earl Davis What is to be made of a material at a point of no return? In early projects, Davis battered already deteriorated banners sourced from parts of Kumasi. This initial interest in fragmented patterns, translated in his recent use of shattered windscreens of cars from accidents. These windscreens are cracked and broken into tiny fragments held in place by thin transparent film. The difficulty in handling the material affects the sculptural and architectural forms that develop. Kevin Abankwah Abankwah’s hyper realistic tableaux draw inspiration from the ‘Dumsor’ (power rationing) crisis that has plagued Ghana for years on end. His staged portraits of subjects holding ‘Bobo’ (locally made lanterns with tins and wicks) and smart phones follow after awkward popular images of people charging their phones with unconventional means. He paints with oil on canvas. Percy Nii Nortey Nortey’s sculptures of mechanical parts are made from second-hand bedsheets/curtains reinforced with stiff fabric. He distributes these fabrics to workers in fitting shops in Suame Magazine, Ayigya and Bomso to be used by the auto mechanics in their daily routines. He then collects the fabrics stained with engine oil, fuel and dirt, and reinforces them with stiff fabric and irons them. The ‘fabric-stiff’ is cut, stitched and glued to construct rigid sculptural objects resembling mechanical auto parts. Nortey also collects sounds of activities in the environments he distributes the fabrics in. Nuna Adisenu-Doe Nuna Adisenu-Doe appropriates Trotro station iconography, (texts, slogans, phrases and objects) commonly associated with mass transportation in his work. The objects he creates using aluminium plated plastic wall cladding imported from China (which have become the preferred choice in construction for façades of commercial buildings such as banks), are provocative re-imaginations of what pertains in the practice of public transport and store-front display. The fonts and symbols that appear in the work are also adopted from popular posters and labels of consumer products and become a visual stridency of clichés, street wisdom and wit, laced with serious critique.
Sandra Adu Agyeiwaa Agyeiwaa’s circular forms are plywood cutouts that come in various sizes. They are imbued with oil pastels as strips and curves. Her vivid palettes are derived from clothes, bags, shoes, bathroom tiles etc. The extent of pressure exerted on the oil pastels determine the quality of images produced on the plywood. The quest for the unknown belie her experiments with colour. Vincent Mensah Vincent Mensah gathers discarded objects and visual cues from urban construction sites within the city; cement, PVC pipes, ropes, sand, concrete blocks, broken tiles and louver blades. With these, he builds, in the manner of the urban poor, vaguely inhabitable structures through processes like plastering, tiling, tying, binding, hammering, nailing and stacking. These robust-looking, yet flimsy installations may be read as commentaries on the uncertainty of the present. These precarious, structures could either stand strong under the weight of gravity or crumble altogether. The potential danger is further heightened by the fact that not all the individual blocks, pipes, wood or metal objects are joined together with mortar. Mary Dame Inspired by colors and patterns on wooden structures in the city of Kumasi, Mary Dame paints color fields on silk using a mixture of acrylic and starch. This seems to set the work beyond the time they were made as the colors seem to fade mimicking the conditions of the wooden structures as the environment takes its toll on them. More recently she has started experiments with cotton fabric, applying fire to the material after painting giving the work amorphous forms. Ameen Farouk Ameen Ameen takes interest in the lower classes of society whose contributions via taxes are not mentioned whenever the nation’s economy is discussed. Concentrating on hawkers and food vendors, he takes shots of their wares as he goes through the city of Kumasi, eliminating the faces behind those wares. These are translated into hyper realistic paintings in acrylic on canvas. Perhaps this may be a call for us to begin to think about the identity of these vendors. Emmanuel Abalo Emmanuel Abalo prints monochromatic images of rusted cans on translucent fabric. He juxtaposes the object and its imprint (made by hammering the cans onto glue-coated styrofoam) to deal with notions of time (countering how nature acts on physical material by freezing the decomposing objects in time through the medium of photography) and decay. He combines photography and print-making processes. Prince Osei Owusu Bempah Bempah appropriates historical images in the form of painting, sculpture and photography. Considering images as a multiplicity, he is now drawn to news from social media, television, radio and newspaper. Information is crucial to the making of his works which extends beyond the visual representations. He reinterprets them in tapestry, embroidery, banners and uses plastic sacks, curtain accessories, second hand table cloths and silk in different configurations. He substitutes certain elements of the original images with mortars and pestles. King George Yeboah King George Yeboah’s project comprises paintings of fictitious cityscapes executed in an almost monochromatic manner with total disregard for conventional notions of visual perspective. Even where many colours are used, the range remains analogous. The city of Kumasi is the inspiration but not direct referent. These could be any city in the world. Yeboah employs collage and photo-transfer techniques to incorporate actual photographs taken from the various communities he visits into his paintings. Yeboah’s employment of naiveté brings a sense of child-like immediacy to his paintings. They draw us in. Michael Akuoku Micheal Akuoku renders a ghostly presence of varied objects unto wire meshes which are usually used in the construction of windows in Ghana. He gathers the objects from varied sites, and sets them on the mesh and sprays on them with paint. He alternately blocks out parts of the mesh to create both positive and negative or ghost and shadow effects. These shadows without objects, and ghosts of inanimate and probably animate things become imbued with an inexplicable aura which looms over our sense of knowing what these objects could be or knowing what they could be not. Andrews McCarthy For Andrews McCarthy, color — organized into primaries, secondaries and tertiaries— is a material for coming to terms with time. He has been inspired by the outcome of peeling posters from freshly painted walls. Though the posters fade over time, the spaces that were covered by them remain partly layered with leftovers from others. As he applies acrylic paint to plywood, a friction due to hand pressure gives texture to the support and quality of the paint. His repetitive process results in sporadic layers.
Frank Kofi Gyabeng Frank Gyabeng’s work is a result of his ongoing examination of the film medium vis-à-vis the cinema scene of Ghana. For Orderly Disorderly, he presents a two minute, fifty second extract from the film Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein, juxtaposed with an excerpt from Heritage Africa (1988) by Kwaw Ansah. Gyabeng also shows the documentary film An Honest Reality (2015) by Jim Fara Awindor, which traces the history of film in Ghana from the 1950s. The recently passed “Film Act” – 2016 (ACT 935), as well as film scripts from diverse Ghanaian filmmakers complete the set up. Edward Buxton Buxton’s paintings open up socio-political and religious issues in Ghana. Through the technique of collage, he incorporates found materials into his paintings to create historically charged pictures. He relies on parody to smoothen the hard edges of his politically sensitive subject matter. Samuel Boateng: Samuel Boateng makes photographic portraits of mundane objects evoking the aesthetic of film negatives. In this series, he photographs nonfunctional switches dating back to Ghana’s colonial period, and digitally manipulates the images to emphasize flatness. Adwoa Konadu Antwi-Boasiako Antwi-Boasiako’s weird objects seek to forge relationships between industrial and traditional processes. Her experiments combine palm leaves and straw/grass, yarns and dyes woven into objects. The usual weft in yarn is displaced by straw and palm leaves knotted with brightly colored yarns that runs across. The objects formed show a continuity between two and three dimensions which allows room for various iterations. Kwame Asante Agyare Kwame Asante Agyare makes large-scale installations with empty processed food cans literally scavenged from all over Kumasi. In Orderly Disorderly, Agyare’s cans form a shimmering frieze that dangles from the roof of the original Museum of Science and Technology building. Within the new museum too, he has installed a huge “waterfall” of cans His critique of the excesses of consumerism. The products that he focuses on can be related to by a lot of people, yet they may also be laced with sense of disgust. The cans are no longer pristine as presented in supermarkets and malls, but have accrued dirt and debris anonymous sites. Lois Arde-Acquah Repetitive dots, interconnected with zig-zagging lines come together to constitute a seemingly endless variety of patterns in Arde-Acquah’s work. Her work centers on notions of choice and manual labor. Through laborious hand drawing processes, she makes intricate monochromatic marks with ink on scrolls of paper, styrofoam, canvas and walls. Her work sometimes takes performative forms. Jonathan Okoronkwo Jonathan Okoronkwo makes large-scale drawings of auto-engineering systems on plywood, with brush and engine oil. His drawings are montages of different engine systems that make up his fictional compositions. Okoronkwo’s forms end up becoming diptychs, triptychs or irregular constellations of drawings on plywood. Benjamin Okantey Benjamin Okantey’s extra-painterly artistic experiments result in both large and small scale non-figurative compositions using industrially produced plastics (such as water sachets, carrier bags and polythene sheets). Differently colored and textured plastic sheets are collected from water sachet printing companies, plastic products retailers, cut opened and put together through processes of layering, superimposition and juxtaposition with an electric iron to compose complex visual puzzles. Shimawuda Darren Ziorkley Shimawuda Darren Ziorkley invests lot of time and labour into scouting for locations, selecting models and constructing props for his elaborately staged photographs. In the photographs, reality, fiction and illusion coexist on not too harmonic terms. An interesting fact about Ziorkely’s props and costumes is that they are made from odds and ends that have totally contrary functions in their ‘real’ lives… Henry Obeng Paper-making is still Henry Obeng’s passion. His new experiments have resulted in very hefty, robust and highly textured papers onto which he has transferred photographs of objects and landscapes that he has taken. Obeng’s paper shapes are also experimental and sometimes obey the dictates of the images that appear on them or disrupt their logic totally.
William Ekow Duku William Ekow Duku employs Prussian Blue as a primary medium in his work. His process involves using elements and materials such as sun (for drying), earth/soil, leaves, manila paper, gum Arabic, white glue, wax candle, fire (for burning), adhesive tapes, and cooking oil to make collages. Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) presents “nazaKU” a photographic installation and live performance that is an iteration of his continued focus on conditions of precarity and vulnerability suffered by so called ‘marginalized’ people as a result of prejudice, violence or injustice meted out by fellow humans. Fiatsi’s Nazaku (Ewe: prejudicedeath), calls the dysfunctional and corrupt systems in the world to order. What responsibilities do nations have to their citizenry? How can human excesses, in terms of rights abuses be checked in the communities? These are some questions that arise out of Fiatsi’s installation. Kelvin Haizel Kelvin Haizel has developed his work from its painterly beginnings, through object oriented installations to currently include the incorporation of video, both as things to be seen on a monitor screen or projected large-scale onto buildings and other architectural structures. For this exhibition, Haizel’s image-objects range from installations made from disused car and motorbike parts (doors, head lamps, tail lamps, indicator lights, taxi top signs), a video displayed on an upward-facing screen fitted in a rectangular wooden encasement and a multi-channel video projection on the atrium of the Museum of Science and Technology. Geoffrey Akpene Biekro Through his itinerant culinary experiments collectively named ‘Captain’s Kitchen’, Biekro performs a roving research project premised on rituals of victuals. Food, its preparation, cooking and eating present the initial point of departure for Biekro’s practice. Working together with a group of his classmates from KNUST, some artists and many other collaborators, “EAT ART” culinary interventions are activated by Biekro in public and private spaces. In this respect, Captain’s Kitchen menus have served food specifically selected from the eating culture of subsistence farmers or manual labourers (low or no-income earning public). These are then appropriated and served at break-time at commercial/business districts, institutional offices or in other unexpected locations as snacks or meals at formal dinners. By following the journeys of foodstuffs from the fields, through the markets to the table eventually to the stomach and even maybe back to the earth to serve potentially as manure, Captain traces these transformations over time and across different regions of the world. Livingstone Amoako Snail shells have found a way of teleporting to the Science Museum from Enche, Sefwi in the Western Region close to the Ivorian boarder and also found their way from Ivory Coast. Livingstone reminisces on a time in his village Senegya when these snails were abundant and have disappeared with the gradual depletion of the forests. For him they resonate of a global concern that go beyond his little village: climate change. By stitching these snail shells to tower like a totem draws our consideration of other life forms and ‘things’ that are connected to our very survival; a consideration of an intra-specie co-evolution. Silas Mensah Silas Mensah paints on assorted fabrics (used bed linen, cotton, polyester, rayon etc.) with manganese dioxide extracted from discarded alkaline batteries and a variety of clays from across the Ashanti and Eastern Regions of Ghana. He uses cassava starch or gum-arabic as binder. The paint medium he formulates is applied loosely with household paint brushes and left to soak into the fibre of the cloth. Mensah exploits the flexible nature of his stained fabrics to drape, hang or form objects that hang in free space, sit on the floor or crawl up walls, imitating the layout designs of contemporary urban dwellings. Theresah Ankomah Theresa Ankomah’s critique of skilled labor leads her to explore materials such as cane, straw and kenaf for her installations. She produces art objects primarily through weaving and dyeing. Some of the objects take monumental form while others elicit the spectator’s participation by inhabiting the simple geometric structures she builds. Simon Bowman Junior Simon Bowman Junior works with analogue photography processes without the help of a camera. He works in the darkroom, working directly onto 35mm photographic film using such unconventional liquids as coffee, tea, salt solution and household bleach rather than acetic acid, ammonium or thiosulphate. Through a lot of experimentation both in and out of the darkroom, Bowman allows the abstract manifestations to slowly emerge. The resultant photographs come as surprises when they are finally printed.