Earthy Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs

Описание: Earthy Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs
Solo exhibition by Frederick Ebenezer Okai
Curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh
28th May - 28th October, 2022
Gyamadudu Museum, Kwabre-Heman, Ashanti Region, Ghana

Press Release

Earthy Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs is a solo exhibition displaying the works of Ghanaian artist Frederick Ebenezer Okai at Gyamadudu Museum, Kwabre-Heman, in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The exhibition is a moment in the artist’s long-term research project which examines the histories and production methods of indigenous pottery and ceramics around the country.

Earthy Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs follows after Okai’s debut solo show titled Light Soup (2021) which inaugurated his improvised, quasi-ethnographic, approach to [re]staging and [re]imagining historical and existing pottery practices in Ghana. Inspired by both autochtonous and industrial systems of pottery production, the exhibition assembles forms including video, sculpture, site-responsive sound installations,
immersive virtual reality and spatial experiences.

The objects in the exhibition are constructed from a wide array of readymades including local vessels collected from various communities in Ghana; welded constellations of galvanized steel wire meshes merged with average and larger than life-sized vessels; and repurposed ceramic objects (cups, plates, bowls, jars, etc.) imported into the country from Asia, Europe, and North America. In this “earthy” constellation, utilitarian objects acquire sculptural, architectural, aural, haptic and other experimental or transgressive tendencies, signifying their breakthroughs…

Frederick Ebenezer Okai (b. 1986), is an artist based in Kumasi and Sunyani, Ghana. On the one hand his interest in clay as primary medium enhances the profound plastic possibilities of the material. On the other hand he pays attention to its paradoxical susceptibility to ephemerality and permanence. Okai investigates the material cultures of pottery in Ghana and researches into the ways in which these functional objects or
artefacts knit into the complex lives of those who make as well as those who use them. He then extends them in an experimental art practice where the objects become new things, à la bricolage. Okai is a lecturer at the Department of Visual and Industrial Art, Sunyani Technical University.

The exhibition is dedicated to Okai’s mentor, the ceramicist and educator James Kwame Amoah (b. 1943), retired senior lecturer of the Department of Industrial Art (Ceramics Section), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), for the warm guidance and mentorship he has provided for the artist over the years.

Earthy Structures and Contingent Breakthroughs is supported by blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Department of Painting & Sculpture, KNUST, Foundation for Contemporary Art - Ghana, Opoku Ware II Museum (KNUST Museum), Kwabre-Heman Traditional Council, Bridge to Africa Connection Inc., and Sunyani Technical University.

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