Afrane Akwasi Bediako, Kwasiada Frankaa, 2019.
Installation, video, Windows game files, augmented reality Android application file, virtual reality headset, trigger image printed on wood. Variable dimensions.
About the work:
Beginning from the expanded field of 21st century artistic expression and materiality, Bediako explores new media tools which prominently conflate the virtual with the real. Kwasiada Frankaa is an experimental simulation of Bediako’s ‘TRONS’ (repurposed machines) which coextend realtime with virtual technologies. The installation offers new experiences and extra-optical situations by way of interactivity, immersion, and participatory encounters between human and non-human agents. This co-presence is enhanced through virtual reality (VR), gaming, 3D animation video and augmented reality (AR) applications.
Artist Bio:
Afrane Akwasi Bediako (b. 1990) is a Ghanaian artist living and working in Kumasi, Ghana. His works explore the idea of augmentation and extensions between technological gadgets and humans. He works with discarded electronic gadgets which he refers to as “amputees” to refashion and repurpose them into machines and micro-organisms. These “TRONS” become potential autonomous agents and media for reflection, engagement and interactions. His TRONS, stripped bare of their familiar housing, become mechanical gizmos imbued with a consciousness which subsumes those of previous owners as well as the artist’s.
Agyeman “Dota” Ossei, Cycling on the Pool, 2020.
Video projection, animation video. 25’.
About the work:
Cycling on the Pool (2020) is an excerpt from a bigger metaphysical story— Threading a Needle in the Dark, an unpublished novel written by Agyeman Ossei. This episodic 3D interpretation of a personal spiritual cosmos is both autobiographical and fictional at the same time. The protagonist, Abayie, wakes up in a dream and wanders into the underworld where the storytellers, Prekese and Nkrabea, together with him, give an account of Abayie’s life story which is the 25-minute tale represented by the animation. The narrative is infused with mythical creatures (a half black man half white wolf, a crocodile deity or Pagagod) from both contemporary creations and indigenous sources. The animation tells the story of envy, courage, and faith.
Artist Bio:
Agyeman ‘Dota’ Ossei (b. 1960) is an artist and senior lecturer who has provided administrative and academic leadership as head of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ghana, Legon from 2014 until his voluntary retirement in 2017. He was the artistic director of Abibigromma— resident theater group at the University of Ghana, Legon— from 2005-2009 and served as acting Executive Director of the National Theater of Ghana between 2012 and 2014. Ossei has translated and adapted literary works into theatre plays— notable among them Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, Osiris Rising and The Healers. The Savannah Center for Contemporary Art Tamale and Red Clay hosted his major retrospective in Ghana titled Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (2020-2021).
Issah Alhassan, Eloquence of The Wind: A Dream of Toffees and Spikes,2020.
Acrylic/Emulsion paint on canvas, vegetable oil, galvanised/steel pipe, cast aluminium spikes, chains, eyelets. Variable dimensions.
Issah Alhassan, Ground Up I, Ground up II,2020.
Acrylic/Emulsion paint on canvas, vegetable oil, galvanised/steel pipe, cast aluminium spikes, chains, eyelets. Variable dimensions.
Issah Alhassan, Swing Along,2020.
Acrylic/Emulsion paint on canvas, vegetable oil, galvanised/steel pipe, cast aluminium spikes, chains, eyelets. Variable dimensions.
About the works:
This installation is made of three parts: Eloquence of The Wind: A Dream of Toffees and Spikes (placed on the floor to rest against the wall), Ground Up I and Ground up II (hanged from the ceiling) and Swing Along (jutting from the wall). The paintings invite its audience to participate by entering them both physically and optically. The intention is to create a situation within which movement, sound, and bodies (from both audience and paintings) are in a constant dialogue. They also explore the relations between abstraction and figurative painting, the dynamics when they both come together and the tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality.
Artist Bio:
Issah Alhassan (b. 1993) is a Ghanaian artist who lives and works in Kumasi. He is currently studying at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Issah participated in Convos on the Wind: an ode to the wilderness and the three Boarders exhibition at the Palais De Lomé in Togo. He uses painting as a point of entry into his explorations of theatricality, objecthood and situations, while raising questions on what painting, sculpture and architecture could mean in our contemporary world. Issah’s works employ materials such as posters, acrylic/oil paints, henna on canvas and objects like cast irons/aluminum and steel pipes. These elements are usually welded or constructed together into objects and installations that reference aesthetics from specific epochs in history (Baroque, Rococo, Tropical Modernism, Abstraction).
Bianca Baldi, Play-White, 2019.
Single channel video installation, colour, stereo, fabric and wood black box. Variable dimensions. 10’45” (looped).
About the work:
Play-White collects under the character of Clare literary elements that fall under the genre of the Tragic Mulatta. This character is typically described as being tormented by an intense sadness that stems from not being accepted by both communities. One such character is the figure of Clare Kendry from Nella Larsen’s twentieth century novel Passing. The story portrays the character of Clare Kendry, living in Harlem, New York, who attempts to go through life as a white woman, which leads to a dramatic series of events. Central to the film is the artist’s research into the phenomenon of Versipellis, a physical trait derived from Latin that literally means ‘one who changes skin’. Like Cuttlefish for instance, who, by changing the colour of their skin, are able to escape predators. In this video installation by Bianca Baldi the cuttlefish, also called sepia, is presented as both the creature that won’t be pinned down to one colour as well as the source of the pigment of sepia. Sepia is often used in photography in the context of archiving, due to the pigment’s resistance to ageing processes, thus helping to preserve certain historical stories for posterity.
Artist Bio:
Bianca Baldi (b. 1985, South Africa) lives and works in Brussels. In her films, installations, photographs and images she addresses hidden infrastructures and narratives of power evoking the histories of film, studio photography, and trompe l’œil. She positions carefully chosen objects and images revealing complex webs of political, economic and cultural influences. Baldi obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 2007 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, South Africa and completed her studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her work has been featured in large international exhibitions such as the 11th African Biennial of Photography (Bamako), the 11th Shanghai Biennale, the 8th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Kunstverein Frankfurt. Recent solo exhibitions include Versipellis at Superdeals in Brussels, Eyes in the Back of Your Head, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and Pure Breaths in Swimming Pool in Sofia.
Gladys Kalichini, … these practices are done in sharing her memories, 2020 – (ongoing).
4-channel video projection (synced). Dimensions variable.
About the work:
These gestures of memory focus on the duality of memory and history, and consider ideas about mourning, remembering and forgetting in relation to the commemoration of stories about specific women within the larger picture of the narration of resistances against the colonial rule in Zambia and Zimbabwe (then Northern and Southern Rhodesia) in the 1960s and 1980s. The work challenges the singularity of dominant liberation narratives, complicates and expands freedom struggle histories by piecing together different memories about women, and provides a multi-layered and complex picture of national independence. The video installations in this exhibition draw largely from research material and archival photographs of women in the independence struggles acquired from the National Archives of Zambia, the United National Independence Party (UNIP) Archives in Lusaka, and the National Archives of Zimbabwe and the (ZANU – PF) Archives in Harare. The installations can be viewed on the one hand as a place to honour female freedom fighters and on the other hand as counter-monuments that present the complexity, fluidity and at times fragility of memory.
Artist Bio:
Gladys Kalichini is a visual artist and researcher from Lusaka, Zambia. She graduated at Rhodes art university, where she is currently a PHD. Her work explores representations of women in relation to dominant, national colonial histories. Her ongoing project focuses on notions relating to the (in) visibility of narratives of specific women in relation to the official independence narratives of Zambia and Zimbabwe (formerly known as Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia).
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (1)
2020
Photography
100 x 100 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (2)
2020
Photography
100 x 80 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (3)
2020
Photography
100 x 80 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (4)
2020
Photography
100 x 80 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (5)
Date: 2020
Photography
60 x 120 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (6)
2020
Photography
120 x 80 cm
Godelive Kabena Kasangati
Untiltled (7)
2020
Photography
100 x 80 cm
About the work:
Kasangati’s series of images from the project traffics uses documentary photography and montage techniques to make commentary on the trafficking of human beings in the world and the trafficking of human organs (bodies are sometimes dismembered). She stages portraits of humans, and photographs living (and sometimes dead) animals from zoos and other domestic situations in Kinshasa and elsewhere, and further manipulates them in Photoshop to achieve her uncanny black-and-white and colour surrealistic representations.
Artist Bio:
Godelive Kabena Kasangati (b.1996) was born in Goma and currently lives in Kinshasa, D.R Congo. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, and discovered photography in 2016 with her phone as a simple tool. Kabena was one a student participant in a two-year training in photography organized by the Goethe Institute in Kinshasa and Academy of Fine Arts. She took part in group exhibitions including the 12th edition of the Bamako Encounters, African Biennial of Photography, Bamako, Mali (2019-2020), and Passing the torch, Institute of National Museums of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa (2020).
Rehema Chachage, The Land Remembers, 2020.
Installation. Soil, video, text by Demere Kitunga, and sound. Variable dimensions.
About the work:
This installation creates a ‘fictional land’, whose remnants are left to be experienced through sounds, texture, smell, and image. Suspending its audience between the present and past; the installation leaves clues which allude to stories of those who were and those who are. The materials used form part of a greater (hi)story. The soil echoing the land of Tanzania grounds us—holding within it, memories of generations past— while at the same time, pulling us back into a reality of numerous losses, which are now reduced to ‘nameless’ figures in history. Through the work, the artist invites us to experience ‘the land’ in a time capsule; as a space that was not defined in totality by the troubled histories that it has been witness to; but rather as a space that was and still is a home to many. It is the spirit in the soil, the breath in the wind and the community that will inherit it long after our memory of it disappears completely.
Artist Bio:
Rehema Chachage is a visual artist whose practice can be viewed as a performative archive which untraditionally collects stories, rituals and other oral traditions in different media (performance, photography, video, text as well as physical installations). Her practice traces hi/stories directly tied (and connecting with) her matrilineage and employs written texts, oral and aural stories, melodies, and relics from several re-enacted/performed rituals as source of research. She has a BA in Fine Art (2009) from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town; and an MA Contemporary Art Theory (2018) from Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently she is doing her Ph.D in practice with the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna with her research focusing on the archive and its methodologies, specifically observing ways of doing the archive differently through one’s practice as an artist.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu, My Dear Kite (You Can But You Can’t) – Late Yawnings 01h43, 2020.
Installation. Video, audio, video projection on fabric, fan, two speakers. Duration: 4’54”. Variable dimensions.
About the work:
This installation is recreating the movement and the shape of a kite flying in the sky. Recorded in this time of confusion and uncertainty, My Dear Kite (You Can But You Can’t) – Late Yawnings 01h43 is an attempt to question the lockdown and the dilemma of in/out[door] activities. The artists repetitive and lost voice tries to make sense of the socio-cultural consequences that will arise from the Covid-19 pandemic. This works also echoes the artist’s own bodily and geographic [dis]placement from Johannesburg, South Africa, having recently moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Woven into these attempts are questions on what it means to be a creative practitioner, to be productive, and the (in)ability to respond artistically.
This project was commissioned by L’internationale as a part of their “Artists in Quarantine” online project between 21st April – 7th May 2020.
Artist Bio:
Simnikiwe Buhlungu (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She obtained her BA(FA) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2017. Interested in knowledge production, how it is produced – and by whom – it’s dissemination and it’s nuances as an ecology, she uses her practice to wrestle between these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers. Lately, she enjoys listening to gospel music and has been thinking about combo organs. Her recent contributions include Bergen Assembly: Actually, The Dead Are Not Dead, Bergen, Norway, 2019; Collective Intimacies – Notes to Self: Intimate 1, mural project, The Showroom, London, UK, 2019; and Small World Real World , Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2020. She is currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2020 – 2022).
Steloolive (Evans Kissi Mireku), NiKANiKA Robotics, 2021.
Sound object, installation. Variable dimensions.
About the work:
NiKANiKA Robotics appropriates the design of the multifunctional milling machine for pulverising grains such as corn, rice, etc. and reimagines it as an experimental ‘listening booth’ with aural and acoustic implications for spectatorship. Steloolive attempts to simplify the digital sound and music creation, that often requires technological materials and skills. This installation becomes a minimal sculpture into which the viewer can access field recordings documenting narratives and sounds from various communities in Ghana.
Artist bio:
Steloolive is a Ghanaian performance artist who works and lives in Accra, Ghana. Known as a sound and Electronic Music DJ, Steloolive’s body of work consists of a mixture of experimental sound performances, fashion, art, and photography. In 2018, Steloolive worked with Dr. Katharina Fink which he further explored on his Smell of the City in a Soundscape where he presented a listening performance and a visual presentation of his smell findings installation in the city centre.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 1, 2020.
Painting. Oil on canvas. 200×165 cm.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 2, 2020.
Painting. Acrylic and fabrics on canvas. 60×40 cm.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 3, 2020.
Painting. Acrylic and fabrics on canvas. 350×150 cm.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 4, 2020.
Painting. Oil and fabrics on canvas. 220×200 cm.
About the works:
Tegene Kunbi showcases a combination of works that demonstrate the scope of his artistic production with different materials in the idiom of painting. Included in this selection are two large-scale oil paintings as well as two mixed media works that combine acrylic paint with textile collages. In these abstract paintings, contradictory elements come together in harmonious landscape themes, agricultural, and woven cloth structures. The friction between flat geometrical forms and complex layers of paint saturate Kunbi’s colour-scapes with unexpected depth and playfully reflects on his experiences at the intersection of two contrasting cultures and environments, Ethiopia and Germany. In recent months, the artist has resorted to mixed media works with collage techniques that use fabrics and textiles. They evoke the colours of Ethiopian robes and religious clothing while staying within the language of his oil paintings. Cloth and paint work together to highlight the aesthetic heritage of his African upbringing while also drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimalism. The structural tensions at play serve to absorb the spectator into its network of relations and materials as much as emphasise its literalness or flatness.
Artist bio:
Tegene Kunbi was born in 1980 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he studied at the Fine Arts School and subsequently taught at the College Academy. He left for Germany with a DAAD scholarship in 2008 and continued his education at the UdK Berlin as a graduate student of Prof. Frank Badur and as a master student of Prof. Pia Fries and Prof. Burkhard Held. Kunbi lives and works as a freelance artist in Berlin. His paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad (e.g. Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Nairobi, Dakar, Amsterdam, Casablanca). He is also active in international exchange projects, including an ifa-funded residency project in Mauritania in 2020. His most recent projects include an exhibition at the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt Berlin and at the AKAA Art Fair in Paris. In 2020 he was selected for the now postponed Dak’Art Biennial. He has been honoured with the Espinette Studio Award (Blaricum, Netherlands), among others.
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, Fizzy Waakye, 2020.
Video (1920p x 1080p). Flatscreen monitor.
About the work:
Fizzy Waakye depicts the decomposition process of hydrogen peroxide on bioplastic substrates made from the organic food, Waakye (beans and rice boiled with sorghum leaves). This forms part of Thompson’s interest in exploring biochemical processes and mutations with foods that reveal non-human relations and hidden co-presence with microorganisms. As bioplastic substrates are living materials containing bacteria and microbes, they decompose hydrogen peroxide as it reacts with catalase enzyme which is produced by most living cells. This complicates the derogatory notion of ‘still-life’; as ‘death and decomposition’ is rather a vibrant/lively force than the reductive notion of ‘stillness and death’ attributed to non-human things. In the video, hydrogen peroxide of six percent concentration is sprayed on bioplastic Waakye substrates causing a fizzy (oxidation) reaction due to the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. The process of fizziness is also metaphorically implied in the name Waakye which means beans in Hausa. Beans produces gut intestinal gas from its complex sugar (oligosaccharides) fermentation. With this use of antiseptics in revealing the hidden presence of microbes in the living body of foods, it already projects the heightened co-presence with viruses and sanitization processes of the Covid-19 pandemic – which is actively shaping entire non-human and human spheres.
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, Sobolo,2019-2020.
Installation. Made of vegetable and eatable elements: sobolo (hibiscus flower), fufu powder, lime juice, salt, vinegar, glycerine, icing colorant.
About the work:
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson is interested in biochemical mutations and plasticity. With mutations come possibilities of deviation from homogeneous inheritable traits. She explores those deviations and deformations in biochemical and thermal processes of generating mutant forms from already existent materials. Through food modifications and bio-synthetic processes she probes non-anthropocentric notions of consumption, ‘still-life’ and so on. Sobolo (2019-2020) is made up of small substrates made to mimic the form of petals. They are ‘petals’ made of plantain fufu powder, hibiscus flower extracts and other ingredients. They come in varied iterations of undulating shapes formed and deformed by the affects of fluxes of heat and temperature that intra-act with living membranes of thermoplastic starches.
Artist Bio:
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson (b. 1993), is a Ghanaian artist who lives and works in Accra and Kumasi Ghana. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi. Her practice is greatly influenced by the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST inspired by the emancipatory teachings of artist and pedagogue karî’kạchä seid’ou. This has fueled Thompson’s explorations into notions of plasticity, temporality and fluxes in forming and being. Thompson’s work has featured in ’Cornfields in Accra’ (2016) and ‘Orderly Disorderly’ (2017) – two large scale exhibitions organized by blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Accra, Ghana. She participated in the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennial (2020) in South Africa and co-curated Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (A Retrospective of Agyeman Ossei ‘Dota’) in 2020-2021 at Savannah Center for Contemporary Art Tamale and Red Clay in Ghana.
Yara Mekawei, 120 Mornings, 2020.
Sound installation with 3 speakers and sand. 150 cm x 200 cm.
About the work:
For 120 days the artist recorded sounds of different times every day at the same location. In the situation of lockdown, Yara Mekawei used the same place, her family home, in the noisy city in East Cairo. The bustling city, its crowded streets, the 24-hour shops were almost empty. In the morning, the artist used to listen to the street vendors and to hear the sound of birds because they have more freedom of movement than people. Over the course of these days, she made recordings throughout the day, noting the changes in the area in which I live. With this installation, he sound vibrations are slowly making the grains of sand crawling down, echoing the invisible, yet existing, changes of things.
Artist Bio:
Yara Mekawei is a Cairo-based electronic music composer and sound artist. Her sonic bricolages draw inspiration from the flow of urban centers and the infrastructure of cities. Interested in the philosophy of architecture, history, and literature. Mekawei uses the optical transfer from musical conversations and transfers the sound waves into visual form. Her work is based on sound as a tool of vision, the philosophy of composition is shaped by sophisticated practices that convey messages of conceptual dimension to the public.
Cheick Diallo, Samsara, 2011.
Design. Recycled metal, nylon thread. 200 x 82 x 70 cm.
Collection Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France
About the work:
In constant collaboration with artisans (weavers, blacksmiths, jewelers, metalworkers, potters, etc.) Cheick Diallo realises in his studio located in the Niaréla district of Bamako, various furniture and everyday objects from disused, diverted or recycled materials. Diallo “abhors the waste of natural resources”. The title of this work, Samsara, means in Sanskrit “all that circulates”, “transmigration”, and “rebirth”. A name that underlines the metamorphosis and detour of the materials at the origin of his creation: nylon thread, imported in large quantities to Mali and at the basis of many of his works, combined here with recycled metal, from dismantled car bodies. Its color echoes the colorful patchworks emanating from the streets of Bamako, where artisans are masters of dyeing fabrics.
Artist Bio:
Cheick Diallo (b.1960) is a Malian designer and architect. He works both in France and in Mali and is the founder of the African Designers Association (ADA). Diallo studied at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI, Paris en Etude et Création de Mobilier, ECM). Through his work, he repurposes the decommissioned or derelict materials he finds in Mali; such as scrap metal, plastic, wrapping paper, fabric, wood, and earth, to make furniture as well as other functional and decorative objects. The works are made by hand by local craftsmen: weavers, blacksmiths, jewelers, shoemakers, sculptors, potters whose know-how and mastery he uses.
Latifa Echakhch, A revolution for each stencil, 2007.
A4 sheets of carbon paper, glue, rubbing alcohol, turpentine. Variable dimensions.
About the work:
A revolution for each stencil is a site-specific installation, consisting of wallpaper made from carbon paper, whose color is dissolved and spread in the exhibition space with the addition of terpentine. The transfer technique used to execute the wallpaper is an homage to mimeography, a transfer technique that uses ink on paper through a stencil). This method of reproduction was once used to distribute political pamphlets. The work combines a strong reference to the ways in which information was disseminated during the events of May ’68 in France, and an aesthetic that is both simple and dramatic.
Artist Bio:
Latifa Echakhch (b.1974) is a French artist who was born in Morocco. She lives and works in Switzerland. Echakhch’s work questions the idea of cultural heritage in an increasingly globalized and urbanized world, challenging predefined conceptions of what constitutes identity and nationality. She often creates site specific works, integrating the references of the architectural space and the geographical location of each exhibition, thus signaling that no spectator sees her works in an identical context.
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