The Future of Coexistence

Existing Otherwise - The Future of Coexistence

21 January - 30 April 2022 at SCCA Tamale

Quiet Parade

The Quiet Parade is all about gathering an unproductive community. Hannah Toticki`s "Quiet Parade" is a ritual for ‘silent being’ and for movements that help you “empty” yourself that was realized in South Africa and Tamale in collaboration with Bernard Akoi-Jackson.
Everybody is dressed in simple, beautiful, colourful capes that resemble tents or saris, some of which have hoods and veils. These capes as a garment create a space of one's own.
The collaboration between the two performers Toticki and Akoi-Jackson started with Toticki sending costumes to South Africa, where Akoi-Jackson orchestrated a parade with invited participants as well as a spontaneous gathering of people. The only requirement is that the participants be totally quiet as it takes place.
The Installation in SCCA includes all the costumes that are hung as a dispersed and undirected parade of individual positions in the space. Some are ascending towards the ceiling or towards the floor depending on the viewer’s position This is accompanied by documentation (video and photographs) of the South African version of the "Quiet Parade" instructed and choreographed by Bernard Akoi-Jackson. The first version of "Quiet Parade" was realized at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark 2019.

  • Quiet Parade, South Africa, 2022. Photo by Reshma Chhiba
  • Quiet Parade, South Africa, 2022. Photo by Reshma Chhiba
  • Quiet Parade, South Africa, 2022. Photo by Reshma Chhiba

For the Gram

For the Gram is a large scale series of silk screen prints of small figurative sketches that Ato Jackson produced during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. The sketches are of abstracted Instagram poses. The human attitude and self portrayal has shifted as most people now extensively inhabit the Internet, and enter the Metaverse. The artist Ato Jackson explores this new folk habit of living online as he pays critical attention to social media as a site of image production, and most especially portraiture. He is fascinated by how the medium (Instagram) suddenly occupies our everyday life. He therefore started collecting pictures of people he follows on Instagram, from friends he knows "physically" to friends he knows only virtually. Using acrylic and oil pastel on paper, he re-produced these Instagram images in paintings, focussing on simplicity, erasure and abstraction in his painterly language. Later in 2021, he translated these small abstract figurative paintings into large scale silk-screen prints. Here the poses, faces and details erraised, carry an absence and are archetypical for the way humans adapt to virtual interaction. No touch, just a pose. "For the Gram" is a study of visual culture and how humans adapt to online existence with the loss of presence.

  • "rocklyn" by Ato Jackson, 2021, silk screen print, 8 x 10 ft
  • "jacquelin" by Ato Jackson, 2021, silk screen print, 8 x 10 ft
  • "matthew kojo" by Ato Jackson, 2021, silk screen print, 8 x 10 ft

Spectrum of All-eyes

Spectrum of All-eyes is an artwork that takes shape as a tunnel leading into the exhibition "Existing Otherwise – The Future of Coexistence". The tunnel is lined with drawings and fresh documentation of a procession and drawing workshop on what it means to exist otherwise that the artist Earnest Sackitay created with local youth. It began with a drumming and dancing workshop and led to a procession through the city of Tamale township to Savanna Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA Tamale). The procession as such is a way of existing otherwise, a rite of passage, the essence of which is now captured in a parade of images along the tunnel into the exhibition.

  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22
  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22
  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22
  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22
  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22
  • "Spectrum of All-eyes", 2021/22

Not Gone With The Wind

Eli Cortiñas video and installation is about the politics of images and their social and political impact. Titled Not Gone With The Wind, the video adopts the form of a collage made of found sequences taken from Hollywood cinema, television series, advertising, TED Talks and YouTube videos, alongside self-made animations. The film also features one of the most independent avatars created in history, Bina48. Bina48 is an advanced humanoid-looking black artificial intelligence figure. She was created after the image of the wife of its creator, the founder of the Terasem Movement Foundation (an organisation that explores and promotes geo-ethical technology for human life improvement and extension). To create this film the artist Eli Cortinas took several promotional videos featuring Bina48 as well as video material from several interviews and Ted Talks that Bina48 has given over the years. Cortinas has edited these into a monolog and synchronized it to her own lips. The work owes its name to the almost eponymous 1939 civil war epic film, "Gone with the Wind", which recently sparked a controversy after HBO Max temporarily pulled the film from its streaming service, for its racist depiction of black people. A simple, poetic addition of the word “Not” appended to the original title appears as a denunciation of the long Hollywood tradition of portraying toxic stereotypes and getting away with it. As a result, the persistence in misrepresentation in mainstream cinema has contributed and still contributes to reinforcing misleading historical narratives. In her video, the artist rightly asks "who owns the narrative"? In the era of fake news, Covid-fuelled conspiracy theories and global political uprisings, Cortiñas suggests that to save the future, one has to reassess the past.

  • Not Gone With The Wind, 2020, single channel video, video still
  • Not Gone With The Wind, 2020, single channel video, video still
  • This Fortress A Land Without A Map, 2021, digital collage, dimensions variable

Black Rose, Just a Vase,
Yellow Leaves, Purple Stem, Bell,
Untitled Hibiscus and Savanna Rose

This installation of earth paintings by Sandra Kyeraa consists of garden beds with painted flowers on them, in front of which grass covers the floor. The paintings are made of organic material such as plants, and earth mixed pigments that resemble celebretal flower decorations, but also recall improvised graves and human marks in and on the earth. This constellation of earth paintings, also taking in the floor, may function as allegorical representations of the brevity of life, decay and finally death. Or perhaps just the psychological acceptance of the limitations to life and growth.

  • Untitled Hibiscus , 20x20, 2022
  • Just a vase, 20x20, 2022
  • Bell, 20x20, 2022

Public Art Rings

Emily Hunt engages the object of the magical ring as a locus for discussing language – most particularly the unusual language construction of a proverb. The proverb is a simple and insightful saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience.

»Life is like a unicycle; if you want to keep your balance you must keep moving.«

»Even a table clock that does not work is right twice a day on the table.«

»If the headphones are on, one feels like they are in their own world.«

»Life is like a blender where all hopes and aspirations are mixed up with fear and despair.«

»When the weighing scale is doing its job, it neither recognises gold nor lead.«

»The thumb is the fortress of the scissors, without which the scissors cannot perform any function.«

»If you greet the calculator with the wrong input, it responds with the wrong output.«

»If you hide evil deeds in your head it one day explodes like a balloon.«

This series of over 180 rings and other objects seek out the shadows cast by things in ordinary life. Hunt recognises the bizarre potentialities in ordinary things. The "Public Art Rings" bring attention to the strange or weird things that live and grow within our world, but that we often ignore. The proverb can call attention to this. The everyday objects such as food blenders, calculators and scissors can be seen through the lens of panpsychism – the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality. The small cosmos of each ring contains an individual enchantment.

The ceramic rings are made to be held and tried on, worn by the viewer and put back on the table, and so the work can be closely inspected.

Job Center. Aufgeladene Orte.
Psychic Places Power Rings

Emily Hunt transfigured the energies of Berlin faces and places experienced while walking in lockdown times. The seven rings depict psychic places in the local neighbourhood of Wedding, Berlin, the JobCenter (unemployment office), the Panke Ufer riverbank, the bar Beim Dicken and the legal courts of Amtsgericht Wedding, Berlin. These personally significant places were channeled through clay, ornament and glaze into ceramic Power Rings. Alongside the rings is a printed map that explains the neighborhood through the practice of psychogeography.

"One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness." Giorgio de Chirico

Places can affect us in the same way that other humans can affect our moods. Hunt used the simple action of walking to question the city and the imaginary possibilities of street life and seeing the ordinary through a different lens. Known as psychogeography, it is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes.

Walking is thinking.
Walking is about making the mundane ~ extraordinary
Walking is about energy.
Walking can make you forget about yourself, if you let it.
Walking is free and fills up your imagination, if you let it.
The street is the best entertainment.

  • Psychic Places Power Rings, Glazed Ceramic, 2021
  • Psychic Places Power Rings, Glazed Ceramic, 2021
  • Psychic Places Power Rings, Glazed Ceramic, 2021

Yoombo, Enyo, Aku Shika,
Yayra, Akwele, Untitled calendar 1,
Untitled calendar 2, Untitled calendar 3

Hair plays a significant role in the culture of both ancient and contemporary African civilizations. Historically, it symbolised one’s family background, social status, spirituality, tribe, and marital status. As early as the 15th century, different tribes used hair to show one’s place in a social hierarchy. Members of royalty wore elaborate hairstyles as a symbol of their stature. With hair being an elevated part of one’s body, ancient communities believed that it helped with divine communication. Rosemary Esinam Damalie creates collages and sculptures of human afro-hair creations that take sculptural form today. Her hairstyle sculptures with woven cane heads are covered in local dyes commonly known as “Yoombo” or “Adama” found in the dyeing tradition among many cultures in Africa. Her works borrow from innovative weaving craftsmanship and lift these hair sculptures far beyond utilitarian goals. The referred hairstyles resemble curious objects that typify the fantasies of the wearers of hairstyles,far from the narratives of saloons. Let your hair exist otherwise!

Ssm strt as theme sng

The large scale drawing Selom Kudje presents is informed by the scenic aesthetics of online platform games where every being is given an instruction. Originally programmed as a moving image, it is held static here and receptive of matter that hovers or dissipates in the space. The compilation of these virtual images into many hierarchies and (game-)levels in the drawing, function as a whole - a world with many entrees. Participation is numbed in regards to this analogue drawing, but still Kudje takes the viewer with him to inspect the alter verse, curious of how the visual culture of virtual reality alter our view on "real life".

Soft Solidarity in Wonderland

Rüzgâr Buşki presents three banners called "Soft", "Solidarity", "Hope", that were originally made for "Soft Solidarity Assembly" by Galerie Wedding Space for Contemporary Art 2020. The banners express the artist's own relation to these three concepts.

"Soft" is the yellow banner with a reptile, a popular figure in his work. It is a trans-species creature. It has grown a thick skin to protect itself from the violence that comes from outside. During this process of living in fear, it understands that survival is crucial, but also that it must remain true to itself. In this case, it must embrace its gentleness. Softness becomes a place of growth and tranquility, where security is not sought on the outside but on the inside - the reptile has 6 breasts instead of a six-pack.

"Solidarity" is the burgundy banner with the cat and the dog. The word "solidarity" is a big word for Burski. This banner is about the appreciation of the network, community, and family or family of choice that a person may have. It is a banner that celebrates diverse and migrant communities and allies who choose to be in solidarity with each other beyond their differences. The artist understands solidarity as an act of love and responsibility. For the banner, he portrayed his life companions, Pera, the black dog, and Mutlu, the white cat, who are also his chosen family. Pera and Mutlu decide to live together in solidarity, he chooses to live with them.

"Hope" is the pink banner, which also reflects the word assembly and social movements, masses of people. A community coming together because resistance is the only way to survive. In the moment of togetherness there is always hope. In Turkish there is a saying: Umut fakirin ekmeğidir - hope is the bread of the poor. The banner shows a group of creatures in a rubber dinghy called Hope. The destination or arrival is not clear, but they are traveling on hope.

  • Soft, Silk Screen on Canvas, 2020. Photo by Joe Clarke (Soft Solidarity Assembly, Berlin 2020)
  • Solidarity, Silk Screen on Canvas, 2020. Photo by Joe Clarke (Soft Solidarity Assembly, Berlin 2020)
  • Hope, Silk Screen on Canvas, 2020. Photo by Joe Clarke (Soft Solidarity Assembly, Berlin 2020)