The artists featured in THIS EXHBITION IS UNTITLED come from the generation that the 89plus project focused on. Far from offering a definition of what this generation is grappling with, the exhibition suggests a snapshot of the artist’s trajectory beginnings. Using the material conditions of neoliberalism, globalisation and consumerism including plastics, wax prints, call credit cards, hair, bitumen and disused everyday objects, the artists featured in this exhibition confront the failures of modernism.
Confronting the present, Yussif Musah’s larger-than-life self-portraits wrestle with death or the idea of it. In a politically charged world where black boys and girls are lynched every day, Yussif manages to capture the anxiety of living as a black person with no evidence of violence. In a sense, he escapes the stern criticism of Teju Cole’s opening lines of his 2015 essay, Death in the Browser1:
‘There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror’.
Musah’s self-portrait scenes merge the documented (from the public archive/ memory such as books and dreams) and the speculated (through play). The performance of the death anxiety is one that is euphemismised with picking of flowers, vulture attack and human skeletons.
Bernice Ameyaw’s installations thrive on gathering and fabricating disused objects. In the time of COVID-19 when we are physically distancing, the idea of gathering remains ever pertinent. By not gathering, we lose the shape and rhythm of our communities. Even at the risk of being mundane, the hope is that gatherings will become possible (again).
Both Amoah and Zakari’s practice of collecting ‘waste’ materials and collaging them into figurations remind us of the lives that we have lived previously and those that we hope to live later. Zakari’s woman figurations exist with such carelessness, and sassiness, and transgression. Amoah, on the other hand, focuses on the face area that in real life is now inhabited by facemasks.
Regardless of the artist’s practice, the gallery offers the space for each of the works to be viewed in the presence of the others – in relation to the others- the present and absent. To put it in the words of Martinique writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant, the Whole-world is ‘the realised totality of the known and unknown data of our worlds’ including “all sudden presences, as well as all times and spaces of the world’s peoples”2. We should think of art contemporaneity as such.
1. Teju Cole, Death in the Browser, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/death-in-the-browser-tab.html (Accessed on 17th, June, 2020)
2. Catherine Delpech, EDOUARD GLISSANT: Poetics and Politics of the Whole-world,
http://worldhumanitiesforum.com/eng/previous/fFileDown.php?chk=1&idx=329 (Accessed on
17th, June, 2020)
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Musah Yussif (b.1997, Ghanaian/Malian) is an artist based in Kumasi, Ghana. He graduated with a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi (2019). He uses charcoal, pastel, and metallic paint for his works.
In this series of figurative portraits, Yussif creates fictional narratives related to the idea of death, anxiety, and fear. These narratives are influenced by movies, books, and real-life events.
The idea of picture making plays a vital role in his composition of drawings, which involves taking reference photographs and manipulating them using photo editing software. The drawings are accompanied by patterns which are influenced by Islamic patterns and Sirigu paintings.
Yussif has previously exhibited in Algorithm of Death and Fear (2019), KNUST-Kumasi.
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WORKS
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Rufai Zakari (b. 1990, Ghanaian), an artist based in Accra and Bawku, examines consumerism, environmental pollution, labour and trade, and the perils of industrialisation in the contemporary
Ghanaian society.His art practice involves using found objects including plastic bags, food packages and plastic bottles. He is the founder of the Bawku-based Rujab Eco-art Foundation.
Mimicking the traditional medium of painting, Zakari’s figurative collages (made from plastic
bags, water sachet, food, and beverage packages) reimagines the women collectors of the art materials and other women that he knows as living a life of luxury. The artist fuses the plastic scraps, trims them into shapes and forms, and stitches them using a rope and needle.By transforming the found objects into arts, Zakari seems to transform the lives of the women too.
Zakari has previously exhibited in CirculArt: A Sustainable Art Exhibition (2019), Casa Trasacco,
Accra; Violence Against Woman Group Art (2018), Accra-Ghana; Yoomo Be Ga Recycle Art
Exhibition (2017), Museum of Science and Technology, Accra; Nima Muhinmanchi Art (NMA)
(2012) Group Exhibition, Alliance Francaise, Accra among others. -
WORKS
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Winfred Nana Amoah (b. 1996, Ghanaian) is a Hohoe-based artist whose media of practice include acrylic paintings, textiles, used credit cards, newspapers, and plastic bags. Amoah uses these materials to explore personal identities and community belonging, particularly in the contemporary Ghanaian context. Amoah’s series of mixed-media depicts the faces of some Hohoe-dwelling people. The face, as a universal concept, is a communicative event.
Seeing these faces, we are left to be ‘accomplices’ in making meaning of these pro-communicative gestures. We see they smile, and we assume that they are happy. When they are stern, we wonder what they might be thinking.
Amoah has previously exhibited in the Evolution of Science (2019) exhibition, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra.
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WORKS
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Bernice Ameyaw (b. 1993, Ghanaian) lives and works in Kasoa and Kumasi. She graduated with a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (2017).
Ameyaw’s practice extends the limitations placed on disused everyday objects. As a collection strategy, the artist negotiates with scrap object dealers and collects her art making objects from them. The collected objects are then refashioned through various processes including assemblage, riveting, and welding.
Ameyaw has participated in the exhibitions Art X Feminism (2020), Nubuke Foundation, Accra; Relations shapes (2019), Alliance Francaise, Kumasi; Chosen among the lot (2019), KNUST- Kumasi; Orderly Disorderly (2017) and Cornfields in Accra (2016), Museum of Science and Technology, Accra.
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WORKS
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The Compressor
Installation (Scrap metal and bitumen)
61 x 61 cm
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Chosen among the lots
Installation (Refrigerator door, scrap metal and bitumen)
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