C&: Did you have any kind of artistic influences in your childhood?
KOA: Growing up in Accra exposed me to many creative exercises and activities — in playful ways. I still remember some of the games we played when we had to fashion tools from the midribs of plantain branches, sticks, tin cans, pen tops, socks, bottle caps and so on. I had a close friend at the time who was a couple of years older than I was. His family and mine lived in a common compound house. He taught me how to draw. He was extremely skilled and I quickly became fascinated with drawing. He gave me drawing exercises to do — drawing comic book characters as well as those from my favorite cartoon series, Captain Planet. He, I would say, was the first influence and who opened me up to recognizing my artistic tendencies.
C&: You studied arts at KNUST in Kumasi. Can you tell us a bit about your experiences there?
KOA: I enrolled into KNUST in 2005 and completed my undergraduate course in Painting in 2009. Before that, I was compulsively drawing from my childhood through to Junior High School. I also studied Visual Arts in Senior High School. What I had understood as art since my formative years was significantly challenged when I begun my Painting program in KNUST. Having met kąrî’kạchä seid’ou — a philosopher and lecturer who, along with the Blaxtarlines team, is transforming the retro-colonial curriculum of the College of Art in KNUST with his emancipatory teaching practice — radically shifted my understanding of art [practice]. In school I was not as gifted at painting as some of my other colleagues were. I remember one day when one of my teachers found my paintings so repulsive that he gave me a harsh telling off. I almost failed his subject. I took his critique very seriously, worked harder and then named my final year project “Untitled… [I Can’t Draw]” as a subtle rebuttal. I have, this year (2015), enrolled into the MFA program in KNUST.
C&: Beside Painting, you also use other mediums. For instance, what does scaffolding mean in your practice?
KOA: Thinking of alternative media and material to articulate an idea came necessarily to my way of working. This has led me to collaborate with architects, photographers, graphic designers, poets, dancers, painters and sculptors. My training in painting was a good foundation into what I consider a much broader multi-disciplinary practice now. I have been more drawn to painting as metaphor than as idiom.
I think of the scaffold as an object that offers the potentiality of change or of becoming. Structurally, it is the accretion of several interconnected elements. It is itself always in the process of construction: never a finished thing but is always negotiating relations with other, more determined, things. I read it as a metaphor of the old (or of something existing) transitioning into something else; something other than what it had been.
Building under construction in Accra, photo by artist
C&: You were nominated for this year’s Celeste Prize for your research series Prison Anxieties. Please tell us a bit more about this ongoing research project. When did this start?
KOA: I am grateful to the organizers and jurors of the Celeste Prize for selecting my work Untitled (3) [Letter To The Sky] (2014) — the third work in the Prison Anxieties series — as one of the finalist works this year.
Prison Anxieties is a research series I begun in 2011. It primarily looks into the formation of the nation Ghana. I have been preoccupied with questions pertaining to my cultural heritage and history. I have become increasingly aware of the fact that when I claim to be Ghanaian I am, by that proposition, categorically affirming the socio-historical, linguistic and political presuppositions underlying that form of identity (as would anybody else who expresses a similar sentiment from any other nationalistic standpoint). Ghana as a nation is a mid-20th century invention. Narratives of oppression, power, will for freedom, recognition of intrinsic rights and desire for self-determination are some of the passions that produced this form of identity for all who are unified, bound and beholden to it. The research series seeks to open up, or perhaps interrogate, the presuppositions of my own national identity in relation to others in the world: studying its ideological foundations, myths, truisms, contradictions and so on.
I have made three site-specific installations and curated one exhibition so far in the series. At the moment, during my residency at Gasworks (London), I am continuing the series and speaking through the idiom of the flag as symbol of nationalistic identification. The interesting thing about this research, I find, is that as I learn more about Ghana I learn about the world.
C&: How would you define the use of flags and nationalistic identification in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris on November 26th, 2015?
KOA: It was interesting to see the solidarity displayed around the world in support of France after the attacks. It brings Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy to mind when he wrote, in a chapter titled ‘The Flag of the World’, that “The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more”.
Even though I am drawn to our contemporary use of flags and what they infer I am more interested in flag-making as a strategy of reconstituting, rethinking or perhaps re-framing, the existing order of things. The flag-making culture known as “Asafo” — which originated sometime in the early 17th century in the then Gold Coast — for me, constitutes a powerful way of encapsulating worldviews or ideologies within the composition of the flag form. They were originally distinct to the Asafo or the military factions of the different sub-ethnic groups of the Akan but later became adapted to specific moments in culture such as for a festival. The appliqué technique was used to piece different fabrics together to make the flag. It was not simply an object to be seen but one which offered a participatory and relational experience owed to its multi-sensorial mode of presentation; for example there would be a distinctly choreographed dance which may be accompanied by percussion and singing on the occasion of its outdooring.
So my interest is not so much in the instituted form of what we have come to know of the flag as a symbolic representation of a particular nation state, but with one whose formal and transcendental value offers more in terms of the fluidity to infuse and express newer, more nuanced, ideas of what art [representation] could be. I would like to be able to explore that further; which is why I am appropriating and attempting to speak through the poetic and dense visual language of the Asafo flag.
Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Notion: 06,03, 2015, drawing, oil pastel and pencil on paper, 21 x 29.7cm
C&: You are also a blogger, right? What does writing mean to you? And how do you navigate in the digital landscape?
KOA: I am not a blogger in that strict sense. I have a blog I have been authoring since 2010. I practice the use of my blog as a kind of solitary room where I can walk into, assume I am by myself and let that determine the content I produce onto it. Before I created the blog I had made short notes of things I had wanted to write about, mainly music and personal anecdotes. I started by reviewing Hip-Hop and Hip-Life* albums, then it began to encompass my everyday experiences and then eventually my artistic ideas made their way onto the blog. I think of the blog now as the virtual dimension which affords me the space to test ideas and implement strategies of displaying my work. It is a sketchpad for my experiments with space and objects.
There is something about the written word that became fascinating to me as a visual artist after my undergraduate training in the university. To express one’s freedom through writing can be a deeply fulfilling endeavor and if art is the arena to assert one’s freedom and test its limits then it made sense to open myself up to the many ways I could explore writing as a form of my practice. When I express my ideas in written form there is a feeling of concreteness that accompanies it. But words are imperfect and sometimes do a bad job of articulating what or how we feel. This dialectic sustains my interest in writing (and language in general).
I think of my work as questions or propositions that partake in a broader conversation beyond themselves. When we make paintings, videos, installations or even exhibitions, we are articulating ideas in tangible forms. Since what people see of my own work is not of utmost priority to me, the question that I am confronted with as I develop ideas sometimes becomes “how else can this concept be extrapolated and presented?” and this leads to collaborations in the curatorial context.
(2015)
*Music genre that developed in the early 1990s in Ghana. It was a fusion of Hip-Hop with local Highlife music.
**A version of this conversation was published on Contemporary And (C&) website as A Sense of Becoming: Scaffolding and Flags.
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