Curatorial Statement
Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace honours the lifework of an artist, dramatist, educator, storyteller and social engineer. Born in 1960, the same year as the dawn of Ghana’s Republican epoch, Agyeman ‘Dota’ Ossei’s resolve to understand, use, translate, and extend the philosophical and socio-political knowledges and ideas captured in Asante proverbs and analogous African cultural systems into modern art practice and social transformation is exemplary. Ossei’s journey in art is a lesson in maturity through commitment, self-admonishment, and modesty. His disposition and affirmative attitude to making art can be summarised from two anecdotes. The first is a lesson he picked up from an older artist and educator, Dr. Sylvanus Kwami Amenuke1 (b. 1940), in 1983 when Ossei was a sophomore at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi. Amenuke was by then a distinguished social realist painter and lecturer at the Department of Art Education at KNUST, who had tactically withdrawn from painting any more pictures until he was certain that his mother, who was a potter in Akoefe, a village in the Volta Region of Ghana, could also participate in the construction of meaning and appreciationii of his work. Ossei recalls having imbibed the egalitarian ethic behind Amenuke’s rejection of the elitism then tied to Ghana’s modern art in an insightful conversation he had with the older artist-educator. At the time, Amenuke was searching for a democratic solution to the elevated and exclusionary cultures built silently into the modern art establishment and discourse. This egalitarian principle, also articulated in postcolonial Ghana by Kwame Nkrumahiii, underlies Ossei’s approach to art and pedagogy in his work as an educator and storytelleriv.
The second anecdotal event happened in the early 1990s. By then, Ossei had finished his undergraduate education, abandoned a stable job in Ghana’s first university, and had begun to spend time at local palm wine bars in the company of his cousin Karikari Ossei and “farmers and so-called bums”— custodians of Asante proverbs and innuendoes who were living on the edge in Afidwase-Koforidua. In this company, conversations, like the dialogue between Okoye and Unoka in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, were full of proverbial expressions based on which a corpus of notes were made. This is the period when the decision to pursue an independent art practice divorced from market pressures came to him, much to the displeasure of his concerned parents on whom he depended for “accommodation and one meal a day”. When asked by his father what practicing art had meant for his future, his elevated “art-for-art’s sake” rhetoric was hardly convincing. It was at this point that his father, speaking in Asante-Twi but interestingly echoing the last line of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’v, gave him a piece of advice; “If you have nothing to say, don’t talk”vi. Later, it was an unlettered woman’s close encounter with Ossei’s sculptures that would direct the neophyte on a path that would eventually answer his father’s pessimist quip, and also resolve his mentor Dr. Amenuke’s concerns. “Don’t you realize that all the sculptures you have created are proverbs that communicate to us?”, she had asked the befuddled Ossei who was throwing art-school explanations about his work around. This experience connected the several epiphanies he had in Afidwase-Koforidua regarding Asante proverbs as tropes of indirect communication, their contexts of use, and their milieu of community criticism. Jolted into being more reflective about his practice, Ossei became aroused to the responsibilities and paradoxes that accompany the taken-for-granted ethos of freedom and independence associated with the autonomous practice of modern art. Asante proverbs also became a cipher through which to exercise a politics of self-assertion while preparing him up for the broader questions about the symbolic, semiotic and metaphysical in art. Ossei then developed an expanded practice and a conception of art as a critical attitude to things and experiences, rather than as an activity that can be exhausted in any particular skill, process, medium or genre.
While the formative years of Ossei’s mature corpus aligns with the 1980s and 1990s multicultural turn in art and culture which patronized localised or indigenous subject matter, he conceived his Africa-inspired praxis as a challenge to the Ghanaian status quo. During his years in the KNUST MFA programme (1996 – 1998), Ossei had already been experimenting with digital imaging technologies to create animations as an extension of his autonomous paintings and sculptures. Meanwhile, video, animation, photography and other such media and formats were, by then, covertly proscribed by the conservative art curriculum in Ghana even though they had already seen significant developments elsewhere in Africa and its global diasporas by that timevii.
The two-part structure of the title, Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace, reflects the “innuendo-proverb” pairing—the tropes of indirect and collective communication that underpin Ossei’s retrospective project. “Akutia”, the Twi idiom employed in this context to mean innuendoes expressed through visual, verbal, and gestural communicative means could be interpreted as a body of allusions that register Agyeman Ossei’s reflections. Tapping into the reserves of collective memory through the subtleties of Asante proverbs, Agyeman Ossei intimates that:
“Blindfolding the Sun is an allegory of the proverb, Ɔbaakofoɔ nsa nso Nyame ani kata (One person’s hands are not sufficient to cover the eyes of God). Ancient religions have all acknowledged the Sun as God. The ubiquity yet anonymity of the Sun in terms of day and night is the mystery encoded in the narratives that the exhibition presents. The collective psychology of our ancestors who bequeathed the heritage of proverbs as well as the community of artists who came together to put up the show is symbolic of the many hands needed to cover the eyes of the Sun. Though “Akutia” is suggestive of strife, in the long run it ensures peace because as the saying goes, Abubɛ ne atebɛ te a, ntɔkwa nni hɔ (When the speaker of proverbs communicates with the hearer of proverbs, there is bound to be peace.)”
This retrospective also assimilates the animating principle of intergenerational conversations inaugurated between 2015-2017 with the trilogy of large-scale group exhibitionsviii of KNUST alumni, organised by blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Accra, Ghana. Agyeman Ossei’s works, which featured in the final edition in the series, titled Orderly Disorderly (2017), was among other 20th century Ghanaian Modernists— such as Galle Winston Kofi Dawsonix and Ablade Glover— and practitioners of the millennial generation. The show also commemorates twenty seven years since the last major solo exhibition of an artist who has only ever staged two solo shows in his career— the first, titled Reviewed Traditions in Ghanaian Painting, which happened in the Shangri-la Hotel, Accra in 1989, and the second, titled Proverbs: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture which took place at the National Museum, Accra, in 1993.
A willful outsider to the limelight of mainstream exhibition circuits locally and internationally, Ossei forges through this seeming limitation with the conviction that artistic freedom is a political commitment to struggle. He exemplifies the figure of a committed artist whose silent but prolific practice in Ghana since the late 1980s reassesses what we have come to take for granted in mainstream exhibition making. Through pedagogy, theater, and other socially-conscious interventions, Ossei’s secularisation and translation of abstract substances into paintings, sculptures, theater plays, animation, TV/radio productions, and many more, works to expand the coordinates of what is possible with respect to exhibition making and art as such.
Ossei’s works, in addition to paraphrasing and translating moments in Akan linguistic culture, also point us to the relational qualities of their idiomatic expressions. For example, in the full Asante-Twi expression Akutia nim ne wura (which means “The one to whom an innuendo is cast unambiguously knows it”), the personification of “Akutia” draws our attention to its phenomenology, and although the content of the message may be generally extrapolated, the tension at the heart of “Akutia” is what sustains the true meaning of the specific remark or criticism. This tension is at one and same time between its necessary logic of equivocation (or the seeming emptiness of meaning or vagueness of content to those whom it is not addressed) versus the singularity of its message directed at the object of interest who decodes it without difficulty. This apparent vagueness, shot through with pinpoint accuracy, is what gives “Akutia” its essence. And since we are all familiar with some kind of “Akutia” or other, regardless of our cultural backgrounds, the audience is invited into an inclusive para-consistent dynamic where perceptions, meanings, and confrontations are based as much on essence and autonomy as they are on contingency and tangible experiences.
As we indirectly experience Ossei’s life poems through his works— in terms of his pleasures, loves, fears, aspirations, anxieties, and convictions— we are also exposed to the vicarious relationship which ensures the infinite translatability of texts such as clichés, proverbs, fables, myths, legends, and novels into both known and new forms. This horizon of possibility is one of the most important lessons to take from Ossei’s approach to art. And the plurality of “sub-phenomenal”, visual, aural, and anthropomorphic elements sited between SCCA Tamale and Red Clay create an atmosphere of interactivity with co-present dynamics between organic, virtual, mute, plastic, ephemeral, and synthetic objects— including plants, braille captions, paper collages, paintings, raised floor, natural landscapes, sculptures, a makeshift pool of water with lilies, participatory installation, radio play, and so on. Some of these forms will be immediately present at the opening of the exhibition, while others will emerge as the exhibition stretches its lifespan.
(Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and curatorial team)
Click to read press release, watch videos.
End notes:
i Dr. Sylvanus Kwami Amenuke entered the College of Art at KNUST in 1966 until 1970 when he completed his undergraduate training. He is the first student of painting to be awarded first class degree in the B.A. Art programme (which begun in 1964) in KNUST. He has rendered curriculum services in Visual Arts to the Curriculum Research and Development Division of GES from 1983 to 2007 and has made significant contributions to Education in Visual Arts in Ghana.
ii See Agyeman Ossei. (2009). Art and Autobiography: A Personal Narrative and National Identity. Article publication. Irdiworld Journal of Humanities.
iii In Nkrumah’s 1963 speech to open the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, he notes that “education must be measured in terms of the soundness of [the learner’s] judgement of people and things, and [their] power to understand and appreciate the needs of [their] fellow men, and to be of service to them”.
iv In this sense Ossei aligns with another of his inspirers, Ayi Kwei Armah— a writer, poet, and novelist whose de-colonial and emancipatory ideas are articulated in his works. Ossei has occupied himself in recent years with translating some of the Armah’s into stage plays.
v “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is C. K. Ogden’s 1922 German-English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 7, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”. In the Routledge Classics edition, it is translated as; “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein (2001). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness]. London and New York. First English edition first published in 1922 by Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner.
vi See Ossei (2009).
vii A noteworthy example is epitomised by the works of artists who exhibited in the South Meets West contemporary art exhibition at the National Museum of Ghana in 1999. The exhibition featured artists from the southern and western parts of Africa and their diasporas who were working with post-media, deskilled, and dematerialised processes.
viii The exhibitions are 1. “The Gown Must Go Town” (2015) featuring 57 selected artists and inspired by Kwame Nkrumah’s speech “The African Genius” made in 1963 when he officially opened the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. 2. “Cornfields in Accra” (2016) inspired by a poem of same title written by the feminist Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo ca. 1964-65. And 3. “Orderly Disorderly” (2017) which honored the lifework of Professor Ablade Glover and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
ix The inaugural exhibition of SCCA Tamale (15th march-15th August, 2019) was a retrospective of Galle Winston Kofi Dawson. ‘Galle Winston Kofi Dawson: In Pursuit of Something ‘Beautiful’, perhaps…’ was curated by Bernard Akoi-Jackson.
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