Below is the speech I gave at the opening reception of TRANSFER(S) on 8th July, 2023 at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany. The exhibition is open and runs until October 1st at the former Galeria Kaufhof.
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Friends, family, colleagues, and members of the general public. We are gathered here in the mood of celebration— of 30 years of the Kunsthalle Osnabruck with the “Bist du Bereit” umbrella of exhibitions in commemoration; of 375 years since the Peace of Westphalia; to celebrate the legacy of textiles production in Osnabrück; and also, if I may add, to celebrate each other. If for no reason at all, as witnesses and natives of the third decade of the 21st century. And it is in this mood that the exhibition and research project TRANSFER(S) has been developed.
TRANSFER(S) comes in two parts across two cities: Osnabrück, where we are presently gathered in Germany, and Tamale, in the northern region of Ghana, West Africa. First of all, there is the exhibition component which is being inaugurated at this moment, and then later in the fall we move to Ghana, to one of the institutions founded by Ibrahim Mahama called Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale, for the public programme which will host talks, screenings, performances, and other discursive events.
We are fortunate at this moment to be treated to such a sublime experience of art by one of the most important living contemporary artists in the world today, in the person of the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. His art practice manufactures situations and infrastructures of hope out of the conditions of failure and hopelessness. Mahama’s practice embodies the blaxTARLINES KUMASI mantra of transforming art from the status of commodity to gift. Therefore the artistic and curatorial intention of TRANSFER(S) invites us to think about the political, historical, economic, and aesthetic connections that exist between Central Europe and West Africa in particular, with implications for the world.
Mahama’s practice presents us with odes to class politics. He concerns himself with the contradiction of capitalist commodification and the obscene exploitation of labour, with deleterious consequences for life on planet earth. His experiments with the worn out, filthy, and grotesque jute sacks serve as allegories to the global agro-commodity trade markets and production networks that connect South East Asia, Africa, Europe and other parts of the globe. For this project, the artist has created a constellation of materials cladding the south-west, south-east, and north-east façades of the now-closed Galeria Kaufhof building in Osnabrück’s Neumarkt district. The installation is the largest yet in terms of scale in Mahama’s body of colossal wrappings anywhere outside of Ghana. The crisis that has necessitated the closure of so many stores of Germany’s last major department store chain with hundreds of shops across Germany, stems from the competition from online retail services (such as Amazon), the steep rise in energy prices and the decline in consumer purchasing power at the various locations, including the Osnabrück branch. It is estimated by Deutsche Welle that some 4000 jobs have already been lost as these closures persist.
Osnabrück’s position in this project is relevant for two main reasons. On the one hand, like Warendorf and Bielefeld, as one of Westphalia’s major indigenous textile-producing cities with a cottage-industrial production of linen flourishing since the late medieval period. This high-quality linen is said to have been Germany’s most important export commodity to the rest of Europe during the early modern maritime trade. In fact, according to German historian Klaus Weber, linen probably made up to 90% of the German-English trade by the end of the 17th century. Hence Osnabrückean linen became so prominently entangled with the slave trade and plantation economy, by means of powerful global flows of goods and capital making use of port cities in Bremen, Bordeaux, London, and Hamburg to reach the African markets. This, according to historians, was the earliest connection Germany had with the transatlantic economy even before German merchants directly begun to participate in the slave trade. By the 17th century, Osnabrück’s linen or True born Osnabrughs, as they were called, had become a crucial commodity to the economy of the transatlantic slave trade both as a barter commodity for captives from Africa’s coastal regions and in making garments for the forced labourers working on plantations in the West Indies.
On the other hand, Osnabrück is one of cities in which the Peace of Westphalia was concluded 375 years ago, for which reason this beautiful city has earned the title ‘The City of Peace’. The Westphalian system, concluded in Osnabrück and Münster, effectively ended the era of sectarian warfare during the Thirty Years War which ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. The standard Western discourse on the Peace Treaty is that the Westphalian system inaugurated the principle of religious freedom and tolerance in Europe after more than 100 years of conflict, it also established the sovereignty of its member states and gave power to the princes. The Peace of Westphalia also inaugurated international diplomacy as a means of conflict resolution rather than military force and stands to this day as a watershed moment in history by establishing the earliest foundations for a European community of states.
However, the unconscious underbelly to this standard narrative is captured by the Dutch historian Prof. Dr. Beatrice de Graaf when she states that: “While the successful negotiations of Osnabrück and Münster brought the long-awaited peace to the people of Europe, the now pacified states turned their gaze outward, [as they] expanded and founded colonies. […] Thus, it was not until the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century that economic empires could emerge whose financial resources and technologies made possible the great expansionist moves of the Netherlands in the 17th century, England in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the German Empire in the late 19th century”1. This critical perspective, to say the least, opens up a dialectical dimension to the discourse on the Peace of Westphalia.
Mahama’s work in this exhibition consists of the worn out and overused jute sack tapestries, newly produced handmade strip-woven fabrics made in Tamale, and decommissioned smocks or ‘batakaris’ collected over the past decade by Ibrahim from various families in Ghana. Incidentally, these smocks originated in Yendi in the northern region of Ghana, which was, until the First World War, a part of the German colony known as Togoland in West Africa. Hence, Mahama’s confrontational installation forces us to open up such wounds of our collective histories, not necessarily to finger-wag, but rather in affirmation so as to collectively emerge through it in the direction of new futures. The result of Mahama’s mise en scène is a traumatic realist montage that establishes direct and indirect connections to, amongst others, Osnabrück’s rich history of textiles production; to merchant, industrial, neoliberal, post-neoliberal capitalism, and to colonialism in its manifold forms. In the process, we are all challenged about what we thought we knew about art.
As Mahama’s politically-engaged practice draws our attention to the inegalitarian structure of domination and exploitation; and of empire, which always privilege a few while dispossessing everyone else on arbitrary class, ethnic, and personal lines, we are also reminded to create new structures that affirm the commons of humanity. We must act as schizzes, disrupting the oracle of inequality that plagues our world. Mahama’s example tells us that through art it is possible. Yet the question lies in all of our hands, it is up to each of us to act on this principle. TRANSFER(S) invites us to this provocation.
Thank you…
(Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh)
- Deutscher Historikertag. (2018). Retrieved July 2023, from 52. Deutscher Historikertag Münster 2018: https://www.historikertag.de/Muenster2018/der-westfaelische-frieden-hatte-auch-schattenseiten.html
For curatorial statement visit: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/transfers-2023-2024/curatorial-statement/
For more information about the public programme in Tamale, Ghana visit: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/transfers-2023-2024/transfers-extended/
*For more information about TRANSFER(S) visit: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/transfers-2023-2024/
Also visit the project website www.transfer-s.org
Download the exhibition brochure below:
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