Abbey IT-A

The exhibition title, Odic Organisms is a portal. It leads into a realm that is self aware in its ability to construct fictions. We arrive at fictions when fragments of preapproved knowledge are arranged in, to borrow from Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, “a system of reality with rational coherence and experimental depth” such that our perception instantaneously compensates for any lacks or excesses in that system to trigger very real phenomenological experiences. If so, then it appears we encounter fiction in any given situation that requires perception. Here’s an example from Pop Culture. In ‘Move’ written by Oloruntimilehin Timothy Olorunyomi (2021) performing as Bad Boy Timz, the persona describes life itself as thus,

“How ego be,
E no matter
Life is a sea,
Plenty Fanta,
Fantasy”

It demonstrates in rhyme, the possibilities of fictioning. The lyrics use the disjunctured imageries of the (un)known vastness of a sea and the known sugary sweetness of Fanta to describe life in pun as a free-flowing fanta-sea worth exploring. We can argue that the allure of life, sea, Fanta and therefore fiction is not always pleasant. With the curatorial statement as a preamble, a curious audience begins to investigate the presentations in the exhibition for the fictions at play.

An early realisation for experienced and inexperienced audiences alike is that this is not obviously an exhibition. There is no welcoming wall text or labels; it is not a typical gallery space with clearly defined entries and exits; it is not clear where the exhibition starts or where it ends. If the usual clues are not available, reality is challenged and so is fiction. The spectators are cast into the roles of crime scene investigators diligently seeking justice for missing fictions. They find that the exhibition has interior aspects after all. Its entrance is marked by the curatorial statement in disguise, presented over a pull-up banner. The familiar form of the banner is fitting. It rationally stands amongst other banners, posters and notices of an active institute—the host of the show. The French word “Bienvenue” invites us in. With familiarity comes a sense of direction and this investigator begins to piece together the puzzle.

As promised in the curatorial statement, we are met with Kwabena Afriyie Poku’s “diptych moving image installation on flatscreen monitors” both playing “MVI_9834_final-copy.mp4”. The architecture of the premises, its exterior and interior, is a design common in Ghanaian cities, evoking a middle-class suburban home in which it should not be strange to find a screen installed in what could have been the living room. However, two screens installed abreast to one another is not entirely rational or practical in most situations–a curious thing. Poku’s installation, titled ‘Righting the Written’ 2023, displays the same video, ‘Stationed Heians’, with varied timing emphasising an individuality we know is both true and false. Given the difference in timing, a character appears to be performing two entirely disparate sequences of movements when in fact they are not. (They are not Félix González-Torres’ Perfect Lovers for they are out of sync.) Their 00.02.17 playtime allows that unless one has eidetic memory specially suited to video,  they may quickly need to invent a strategy to track the sequences long enough to notice that both are indeed copies of the same video. When this accidental display of copies is not what is showing, the same installation presents two actually distinct videos; ‘Blotting Out Ordinances’ and ‘Stationed Heians’.

Without departing from the living room imagery, quilted fabrics, ‘Scrolls’ 2023, drape over a window from its cornices as curtains would. Having said that, it is striking how these things flow too far down, creeping about halfway across the floor. Almost similarly, another unlikely curtain drapes adjacent to it. This time from the ceiling, over the cornice to the floor where it rests. They fail to completely cover the windows. About a foot away from them, a red quasi-fabric, ‘Gli’ (Walls) 2023, hangs. Woven from sewn fibres—each made of fabric themselves, and 3 inches thick at the diameter—in a plain weave pattern, arrested at their crossings to form an irregular grid of square-shaped holes through which the window and its light, the cornice and the wall travel to relate with the audience. For spectators who have been coded in the appreciation of cosy beddings and soft carpets, there is a tendency to feel welcomed to these objects and spatial installations by Dorothy Akpene Amenuke. To stand, sit or lay on them. A filter placed over the source of lighting casts a dim red light over the objects, effectively increasing their physical appeal. Nyahan Tachie-Menson’s ‘GLITCH: It’s 2022, You are [back] in a Womb’ 2022 which references Amenuke also suggests warmth albeit in a fictionalised womb—alluding to actual living organisms. The difference here is that “organisms” as used in this show is metaphorical. On the contrary, for spectators coded differently (and this may amount to how many Nigerian movies one did watch growing up), these physical attributes may be read with a sense of foreboding. The strange-thingness of the objects and the red glow may communicate an ominous otherworldly presence. From the scrolling partial blinds, to the overly porous red walls and soft carpets, and now to another scroll which conceals a hidden door, the body—having done a 180—traces half a circle of reflections on restriction and invitation. It continues through a narrow open doorway into a dark tunnel labelled “LA ZONE PÉDAGOGIGUE”. There, an installation of black and white fabrics stitched together, ‘Harmonics of Dislocation’ 2023, creeps over the walls and ceilings, leading to an unknown realm of… knowledging?

Or perhaps to nowhere at all, because this investigator quickly breaks their musings and returns to their physical body, still indoors to complete that circle. There, a circular relief hangs on a black wall, surrounded by paintings. Its surface is finished with acrylic paints that mimic metals. This optical illusion pairs with its physical attributes of raised parts which are emphasised by the incidence of light in the space, creating shadows. It hyperbolises the affinities Morris (1966) describes between the relief and painting, which for them, render the former illegitimate. This exaggeration in Mantey Jectey-Nyarko’s work is complicated further by several formalist paintings on square canvases which surround the relief on the same wall. Here two worlds collide. Or rather, they are united. The paintings contain relational parts of shape, line and colour that, per their arrangement on the wall, create several optical gestalts. Including a unifying square tilted on its axis at an angle of about 90°. This constellation of paintings around the circular relief, ‘Mirrored Hybridity’ 2023, also serves a spatial function. Their deliberate composition is evidence of a more explicit fictioning. Recalling their outdoor counterparts hanging on the inner walls of the compound’s perimeters, which we would have already encountered. The circular and semicircular forms outside, ‘Dialoguing those who were’ 2023, relate so well with their specific architectural environment. Their placements on the wall, above a flowerbed of grass and proximity to a few neatly trimmed Superstar Croton bushes give the impression that they belong—perhaps more as decoration rather than art. There, the intentionality is subtle and so is the fiction, yet it obtains. Potent.

Forcefully ejecting us from the suburban home and its associated comforts, Kwame Opoku-Bonsu’s installations evoke the violent imagery of execution by hanging or gunfire, and physical entrapment. In ‘Stacked and Broken Object and an Arrow’ 2023, a life size figure cast in reinforced fibreglass is trapped inside a cage of wooden beams, 5 inches thick and about 9 feet tall. A steel chain meanders from beneath the wood. The installation is reminiscent of the popular party game, Jenga. The players’ aim is to deftly extract one block of wood from a vertically stacked pile and place it on top. The tower grows taller, but its foundation is weakened, making it more susceptible to the effects of gravity. One wins by managing to continue extracting and stacking without toppling the tower over, yet there is greater jubilation when the tower eventually falls! This crime scene investigator attempts to escape visions of violence for fun, but memory, expectation, and prejudice are some of the intentions that allow for phenomenological truth. The same applies for deceit. Because, Opoku-Bonsu’s beams are stationary. They don’t move like in the game and the erect structure does not fall. Conversely, this is not sustained in ‘Guns, Stakes, and Fodder’ 2023 and ‘Hung’ 2023 both of which include wheeled parts that suggest a consideration for mobility and change. What is sustained is the recurrence of forms easily associated with the masculine—straight, protective, unyielding; limiting, destructive, oppressive.

In fact, these Odic Organisms are subject to myriad changes. Whether by design or honest mistake, Afriyie-Poku’s video installation changes. As does their installation, ‘Bright Mirror, Iron Horse and Coffee’ 2023, which emerges from kata they practised with brewed coffee—spills and martial arts movements, marinating in the memories of open-night spectators. For the tardy observer, the aroma of brewed coffee fades, the stain is bleached by sunlight and what remains, washes off with the rains. Normal life continues here in spite of these parasitic Odic Organisms. On the weekends, washing goes up to dry on the trimmed bushes in front of Jectey-Nyarko’s reliefs or on improvised drying racks finding place between Opoku-Bonsu’s canons and monoliths. On weekdays, when Alliance Française opens for lessons, the figurative sculptures must be dressed in loincloth to pacify parental interests in protecting the innocence of the institute’s young pupils from flaccid fibreglass phalli—is this an instance of what the artist posits as “specific social threats to the masculine as endangered human species and culture”?The objects and situations in this exhibition are as contingent as evolving organisms, and their self-awareness to the various agents of fictioning that create them and the ones they generate after the fact is poetry. The crime scene investigator is consistently led astray, as all evidence appears to be doctored. No real conclusions can be drawn yet all suspicions are confirmed, for upon exiting, they meet again the large idiosyncratic sign at the institute’s main entrance which proclaims, “ART EXHIBITION” and invites, “JOIN US”.

Odic Organisms is a group exhibition of works by four Ghanaian artist-academics, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Kwabena Afriyie Poku, Kwame Opoku-Bonsu, and Mantey Jectey-Nyarko. Showing at the Alliance Française, 15 Archbishop Sarpong TUC, Kumasi. It is curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh.

-Abbey IT-A
supplemented with insights from: Sonia Rottermann, Yussif Musah, Philip Asamani, Godelive Kabena Kasangati