TRANSFER(S)
Solo exhibition of work by Ibrahim Mahama
July 8 – 1 October, 2023
Co-curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh & Bettina Klein under the auspices of Kunsthalle Osnabrück
The research and exhibition project dubbed TRANSFER(S) was launched in Germany on July 8 en plein air with a monumental installation of Ibrahim Mahama’s montaged tapestry of strip-woven textiles, decommissioned jute sacks and batakaris (traditional garments cumulated from the northern region of Ghana) which draped the south-west, south-east, and north-east façades of the now-closed Galeria Kaufhof building in Osnabrück until October 1st, 2023. The exhibition engages a plurality of historical and contemporary flows, knots, and contentions between Central Europe and West Africa with Ibrahim Mahama’s art practice as its muse. The project is commissioned by the Kunsthalle Osnabrück on the occasion of its 30th anniversary to doubly respond to the legacy of the Westphalia Peace Treaty—signed in the neighboring towns of Osnabrück and Münster 375 years ago—and the history of textile production in Osnabrück.
TRANSFER(S) engages textiles in seven registers: as signifier, image, means of production, cipher, material, technology, and form of sociality. The exhibition taps into the complexities of the thematic points and engages them as integers of encoded economic, aesthetic, and socio-political relations transcending oceans and borders on a planetary scale. In this scope, the project aims to come to terms with the centrist-hierarchical power dynamics latent in these relationships which have engendered domination and exploitation since feudalist and mercantile capitalist regimes into our present day, while also generating alternative, disjunctive, and emancipatory trajectories through Mahama’s artistic vision and other discursive positions in an extended programme in Ghana.
The project morphed into discursive and relational forms in its second phase and shifted its locus from Osnabrück in Germany to Tamale in Ghana. From 28th November to 1st December, Red Clay and its sister institutions, Savannah Centre of Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale, and Nkrumah Voli-ni (institutions founded by Mahama), hosted a plurality of perspectives coming together to supplement the artist’s and curators’ positions. To this end, weavers, academics, technicians, historians, musicians, publishers, fellow artists, and curators are invited as co-workers and/or co-producers with whom to proliferate the aesthetic-historical-political strands of the project which was done through symposiums, community-based workshops, temporary exhibitions, durational performances, lectures, and live music.
See curatorial statement here: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/transfers-2023-2024/curatorial-statement/
See more on the public programme here: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/transfers-2023-2024/transfers-extended/
For more information visit:
https://transfer-s.org/tamale.html
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