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Time travel African-style hasn’t looked so cool since the superhero Black Panther rolled back the years to thwart the evil Kang in the Marvel blockbuster Wakanda Forever. Artists from Ghana and the African diaspora have contributed to an exhibition called In and Out of Time, which explores the Ghanaian idea of sankofa, meaning to return to the past in order to go forward, according to the curator, Ekow Eshun.
Through paint, collage, photography and video, 19 artists pursue “African cultural notions of non-linear time”, adds Eshun, a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. All the contributors to the show in Accra have close ties to Africa but in some cases they are based in the UK, the US, Austria and elsewhere.
For some of them, interpreting the brief has meant filling in the blanks where art history has overlooked black experience. Arthur Timothy, an architect and artist originally from Ghana who now lives in Bath in the UK, found that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence had vanishingly few representations of the black people who lived in Italy at the time of the Renaissance. His response was to paint African women promenading in front of the Ponte Vecchio bridge. They are assured, even haughty, in their bright fabrics.
Todd Gray, who was once Michael Jackson’s personal photographer, uses photomontage to juxtapose images about African history from different periods. His pictures of old slave trails, the last features of their homeland that enslaved Africans would have seen before transportation, are overlaid with a 19th-century Parisian fountain featuring a woman in chains, who was intended to represent the continent of Africa.
Eshun says the show was inspired by the work of the American scholar Michelle Wright, who draws on quantum physics to imagine time as a circle, calling it “a place of black possibility, where past, present, collective memory and speculative future merge into one”.
Whether you believe the hands of the clock tell us the full story or not, this is an important moment for the art of Africa, with ever-growing international interest in the work of artists who trace their origins to that continent. Galleries and collectors were reviewing their holdings even before the Black Lives Matter movement, though that certainly galvanised many to find significant gaps where black art is concerned, and hasten to make good the omission.
The contributor to the show with the biggest buzz around him is the Vienna-based Amoako Boafo, whose works can command seven-figure prices. The Ghanaian has been called “the future of portraiture” by mega-dealer Larry Gagosian. His work was blasted into space on the side of Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship (though it floated back to Earth, in good shape, just 11 minutes later). Boafo’s rise came after Kehinde Wiley, the African-American artist best known for his portrait of Barack Obama, saw his pictures on Instagram and tipped off the galleries he works with.
Like Wiley, Boafo specialises in images of black people, often painted with his fingertips, but he has also attracted comparisons with the expressionist and fellow Viennese resident Egon Schiele. Boafo’s contribution to the Accra show is a self-portrait. He is seen from behind, naked from the waist up, with his arms stretched above his head. In the portrait, Boafo has given his back a going over that would do justice to the most unsparing masseuse, leaving smears of blue and brown. Boafo told me that working without a paintbrush “allows me to create freely and to achieve an expressive skin tone. I love that this seemingly simple motion generates such an intense energy, allowing me to bond with my subjects in a very unique way and unveil these sculptural figures.”
Asked about the growing attention that art from his part of the world is getting, Boafo says, “There is a vibrant energy coupled with passion and hard work from the creatives coming from the continent. The passion to create has always been there, mind you; the rest of the world is only now catching on because they are attracted to this vibrant energy.”
Many other artists in the exhibition owe their start to Marwan Zakhem, a Lebanese-born developer and entrepreneur. He established Gallery 1957, named after the year Ghana gained independence from Britain. With its distressed concrete walls and bare floor, it resembles an old warehouse. In fact, it’s the top floor of Zakhem’s shopping mall. He supports residencies for artists at studios in the mall and funds an art prize for women. One former winner, Ghanaian Priscilla Kennedy, has work in the show.
While artists in the Accra exhibition explore very African concepts of what it might mean to go back to the future, there’s a timeliness about their work in the here and now. A tune released by Charlie Parker in the same year Ghana gained independence went on to become a standard: “Now’s the Time”.
To December 12, gallery1957.com