TRANSFER(S)

Installation in public space: Former Galeria Kaufhof building, Wittekindstr. 23, 49074 Osnabrück, photo by IUB

TRANSFER(S)

Ibrahim Mahama monumental installation in public space in Osnabrück (DE) and discursive programme in Tamale (GH)

July 8 to October 1^st, 2023

Opening: July 8, 2023, 4pm  

On the occasion of Osnabrück’s anniversary celebration of 375 years since the Peace of Westphalia, the internationally renowned artist Ibrahim Mahama is dedicating himself to investigating the city’s history of linen trade in his new research and exhibition project dubbed TRANSFER(S). From 9 July to 1 October 2023, the Ghanaian artist will wrap the former Galeria Kaufhof building in Osnabrück’s city centre with a monumental tapestry of strip-woven textiles, locally collected smocks from Ghana, and his signature repurposed jute sacks. 

The research and exhibition project explores a variety of historical and contemporary transfer circuits between Central Europe and West Africa. Thematically, it ties in with Osnabrück’s historical importance as one of the most important textile production regions in Westphalia, among others for linen fabric, which became known as “true born Osnaburghs” and dates back to the fourteenth century. This linen was also used as a means of exchange for captives from the coastal regions of Africa and to make clothing for the forced labourers working on the plantations of the West Indies. 

The former Galeria Kaufhof building with its equally diverse history and future realignment is ideal for these debates. As early as 1955, the Merkur department store had opened there on the site of the Hotel Germania (known from E. M. Remarque’s novel “The Black Obelisk”), which had been destroyed during the war. Local city history, war and post-war experiences are thus placed in the context of global trade and power relations through Mahama’s intervention. The building is currently being converted by the Hamburg-based project developer Home United and, as of 2024, will house not only the cross-community space “Osnabrücker Ding” but also, among others, the departments of Art/Art Education and Textile Design of the University of Osnabrück.

In addition to Mahama’s installation in Osnabrück, TRANSFER(S) also includes an accompanying public programme at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale (GH) this autumn. SCCA Tamale is one of three institutions Mahama has established in his hometown. This autumn, the SCCA Tamale will serve as a discursive hub where the historical-political strands of the research premises will be unravelled in a series of talks, seminars, exhibitions, performances and presentations. The multi-day events are designed to create further perspectives in exchange with academics, curators, historians, musicians and artists. 

Curators: Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and Bettina Klein 

The project is commissioned by the Kunsthalle Osnabrück

Ibrahim Mahama’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions such as the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), the 22nd Biennale of Sidney (2020), the 56th and 58th Biennale di Venezia (2015, 2019), the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2019) and documenta 14 (Kassel, Athens, 2017). He is the artistic director of the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2023).

Funded by the TURN2 Fund of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media). With the support of Kulturhauptstadt Europas (European Capital of Culture) Chemnitz 2025. The project is supported by Koch International Heinrich Koch Internationale Spedition GmbH & Co KG as well as by Home United as the developer of the “Osnabrücker Ding” in the former Galeria Kaufhof building.

Read E-Flux announcement here: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/529424/ibrahim-mahamatransfer-s/

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

 

 

Art Basel Conversations | Artist-Led Spaces: Learning from the African Continent

Artist-Led Spaces: Learning from the African Continent

Artist-led spaces on the African continent are not a new phenomenon, but it’s a growing one. Artists are paving the way for future generations by setting up initiatives to support both their own practice and that of their peers. This conversation brings together representatives of four different projects on the African continent – located in Kumasi, Lagos, Nairobi, and Harare – to discuss their dreams, challenges, politics, and the impact they hope to have on their community and beyond. What can we learn from these new organizational models and networks?

Panelists:

‣ Yinka Shonibare, artist and Founder, Guest Artists Space Foundation, Lagos and Ijebu; Guest Projects, London

‣ Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, curator and critic, blaxTARLINES, Kumasi

‣ Dana Whabira, Artistic Director, Njelele Art Station, Harare

‣ Kaloki Nyamai, artist, founder and director, Kamene Art Residency, Nairobi

‣ Moderator: Kadiatou Diallo, curator, facilitator and cultural practitioner, Basel

Bios:

‣ Artist Yinka Shonibare CBE was born in London, UK and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He lives and works in London. His interdisciplinary practice explores cultural identity and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. In 2021, Shonibare launched Guest Artists Space Foundation, a non-profit founded and developed by the artist. The Foundation is dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange through residencies, public programmes and exhibition opportunities for practitioners from around the world. Shonibare is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Goodman Gallery.

‣ Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is a key member of the blaxTARLINES coalition and Exit Frame Collective— who has been running the annual peer-led, schizo-pedagogical and inoperative art school project called CritLab since 2020 in Ghana. Ohene-Ayeh co-organises Kelas Bareng — an experimental educational project managed between Gudskul, blaxTARLINES, Städelschule, and Nordland Kunst og filmhøgskole which featured in documenta fifteen (2022). He is presently a teacher at KNUST in Kumasi.

‣ Dana Whabira is an artist who lives and works in Harare where she founded Njelele art station. The station’s focus is the generation of projects through research, experimentation and exchange. Njelele is there to generate a critical gaze on society and history and interested in notions of interconnection, community and conviviality. In the past, programmes have encompassed residency, exhibition, talks, including a collaboration with the National Gallery, and now radio. It currently broadcasts from Zimbabwe on njelele.art/radio.

‣ Kaloki Nyamai creates intricate compositions on canvas. His works have shown internationally at the Stellenbosch Triennale (2020), Dakar Biennale, and Venice Biennale (2022). Recent solo shows include ‘Moments That I Miss’ (2022) and ‘Dining in Chaos’ (2023) at Galerie Barbara Thumm. Nyamai lives and works in Nairobi, where he is the founder and director of Kamene Art Residency. Kaloki Nyamai is represented by Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

‣ Kadiatou Diallo is an independent curator, facilitator and cultural practitioner based in Basel. She currently works as research associate at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel and as lecturer for the Master of Arts in Public Spheres (MAPS) at the édhéa (école de design et haute école d’art) in Sierre. The Art Basel 2023 Conversations program is curated by Emily Butler. Coordination and support: Arianna Guidi.

Oyindamola Fakeye: ‘Not Knowing Is Our Pedagogy’

In this conversation Oyindamola Fakeye, curator and Creative Director of Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos, and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, curator and critic based in Ghana, focus on Bisi Silva’s curatorial and institutional legacies to discuss counter-mainstream pedagogical initiatives such as Àsìkò Art School and its impact on non-formal art education and professionalisation since it was founded in 2010. Silva’s passion of appropriating the expanded field of curating to augment educational and art history has been institutionalised through CCA Lagos and Àsìkò—the alternative art school project she inaugurated. This Africa-centred project has trained countless artists and curators while connecting art professionals from all over the world. Fakeye talks about the necessity of sustaining Silva’s legacy while highlighting some of the egalitarian pedagogical models explored in the programme.

The interview was published in Art Schools, ArtReview’s new and wide-ranging report on the state of art education today (9th March, 2023). To read full article visit ArtReview or Researchgate.

On [Pseudo-]Impossibilities and the Politics of Becoming: Postscript to the Conceptual Framing of the Thirteenth Edition of the Bamako Biennale

“It is out of tension that being is born. Becoming is a tension, and being is the child of that tension of opposed forces and tendencies.” Kwame Nkrumah¹

Approaching a topic such as the one outlined in the title of this essay demands a framework consistent with emancipatory politics. I find Nkrumah’s maxim in the epigraph suitable not only because his thought system resonates with the political substructure of the biennale in terms of the dialectics of subjectivation he theorises— by squarely addressing notions of multiplicity, difference, becoming, and heritage— but also because I believe there is much in this beginning point to unpack by way of restituting the photographic form into the space of multiplicity, given the gravity of the biennale which serves as Africa’s sole and most important largescale exhibition dedicated to lens based practices. This essay is however not a review of the most recent edition of the biennale. It will not give much information about the five chapters, curatorial decisions, seventy five artists’ works, nor exhibition sites. It is rather considered as an experimental effort to think through the thematic framework of the biennale based on its conceptual and philosophical proposals. 

“Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” is the theme for the biennale. The phrase, theorised in the context of personal identity by the Malian ethnologist, historian, and author Amadou Hampâté Bâ, vis-à-vis Bambara and Fulani worldviews, loosely translates from Bambara into English as “the persons of the person are multiple in the person”. To paraphrase Bâ, the concept of the person is, from the outset, very complex²; which is to say that a person is always and already multiple from the vantage points of the physical, psychological, and spiritual conditions that shape personhood (Bâ prefers to call this “interior multiplicity”). In this system the being of personhood is neither absolute in their singleness nor wholly complete unto themselves. Here Bâ not only affirms the dynamism of contingency at play in this interiority, he also introduces the counter-intuitive (and arbitrary) universal dimension even within the particularity of personal being. And this dimension could be said to be the excess that is intrinsically constitutive of the production of cognitive reality but which is at the same time patently disavowed³ by purist and individualist ideologies. Ultimately it can be posited that the immanent tensions that pre-condition being are eternally present in any procedure of subjectivation (the event of becoming a subject), and it is in this spirit that I map Nkrumah’s tactically hysterical discourse on being and becoming⁴ to Bâ’s. Nkrumah’s aphorism encapsulates what I have already mentioned as the dialectics of subjectivation (or further summarised as the paradox of becoming), and since Bâ’s framework is not mutually exclusive to this thought I proceed for the remainder of this essay on this bricolage. 

Exhibition view, National Museum of Mali, Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono: On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming and Heritage, photo by author

Read full text here: https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/texts/pseudo-impossibilities/

CritLab 2022

The third edition of CritLab took place in Tamale and was hosted at the Agyeman Osei Hall in Red Clay. For the most part of fifteen days participants and facilitators were co-present with works on display from the permanent collection of Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale and Red Clay. For the duration of our stay in Tamale, the city became the site of many generative encounters, artistic interventions and pedagogical exchanges. The selected artists, critics, and curators learned with and from each other as well as local artisans, filmmakers, producers, schools, fashion houses, open markets, city corners, and other creative spaces. The scheduled and unscheduled site and studio visits also took us to SCCA Tamale, Nkrumah Voli-Ni, OBL Studios , Sanatu Zambang, the Centre for National Culture (Tamale), Nuku Studio, and to the Trends Runway fashion show in Tamale, amongst other locations. Besides the rich intellectual stimulations between co-facilitators, participants, and audiences, the city of Tamale was also ignited with temporary interventions such as performance lectures, interactive games, installations, participatory and site-specific projects, among others.

About CritLab

CritLab is a combined residency and professional development programme that aims to build a network of art professionals who desire to push the boundaries of global art thought, production, criticism, and exhibition making. Exit Frame Collective (Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Kelvin Haizel, Adwoa Amoah and Ato Annan) inaugurated this annual peer-to-peer pedagogical project for artists, critics, and curators in 2020 as part of its efforts to deepen the critical intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana. There is no fee for participation. CritLab is structured to mobilize readings/discussions, site, and studio visits, seminars, film screenings, workshops, presentations, discursive, relational and other contingent formats in the direction of emancipatory pedagogy. Exit Frame runs the programme with co-facilitators (artists, researchers, historians, curators, academics, and many more) from all over the world.

CritLab 2022 Participants: Nana Efia Serwah Barning (GH), Ayine Akolgo (GH), Edward Prah (GH), Maame Araba Baboa Opoku (GH), Isaac Gyasi (GH), Eugenia Asarewaa Kwateng(GH), Sihle Sogaula (SA), Ernest Atsukofi Akaba (GH), zozoTransistor (a.k.a Zoë Binetti) (CH), Ama Adoley Newman (GH)

Co-facilitators: George ‘Buma’ Ampratwum (Ghana), Gideon Appah (Ghana), Nuna Adisenu Doe (Ghana), Exit Frame Collective (Ghana), Chiara Figone (Dakar/Milan), Isshaq Ismail (Ghana), Nkule Mabaso (South Africa), Baerbel Mueller (Austria/Ghana), Nontobeko Ntombela (South Africa), Laurel Richardson (U.S.A), Shane Aslan Selzer (U.S.A), Gesyada Siregar (Indonesia), Łukasz Stanek (U.S.A)

Volunteers: Kimathi Agbanu, Franklin Yohuno, Sam Amegavi, Elizabeth Johnson, Bright Ahadzivia, Ernest Ofori Sackitey, Abbey IT-A

Partners: blaxTARLINES, SCCA Tamale, FCA – Ghana

Supporting institutions: Goethe Institut, Accra

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