#bernard akoi-jackson

[contemporaryartdaily]

Group Show at Kunstverein Braunschweig

[immigrantslenz]

Material Effects Exhibition

Contemporary Ghanaian artists Ibrahim Mahama, Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Zohra Opoku are currently taking part in an exhibition themed “Material Effects” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU. 

Akoi-Jackson in collaboration with some volunteers solicited audience participants to engage in a performance that unravel the tensions inherent in our daily submission to institutional, ideological, and aesthetic authorities yesterday.  

Ibrahim Mahama, Bernard Akoi-Jackson together with London Based independent curator Osei Bonsu will be having an artists talk today. They’ll be talking about their work as artists and their participation in the Material Effects. 

Photo Credit: Ibrahim Mahama

[blackcontemporaryart]

Material Effects: Contemporary art from West Africa and the Diaspora

on view November 6 – April 8, 2016 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

This exhibition brings together artists from West Africa and the diaspora whose work examines the symbolic, economic, and everyday value of objects and materials—man-made or otherwise—in our commodity-driven yet increasingly digitized world. Inspired by currents of renewed artistic and scholarly interest in the poetic relationship between things and humans in contemporary society,Material Effects features existing and newly commissioned works of video art, sculpture, performance, and installation art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated brochure featuring an essay by curator Yesomi Umolu.

Images: Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Untitled (Goldman), 2012; Zohra Opoku, Post No Bill, 2013.

[vanessapeterson]

Isn’t it curious that fourteen years into the 21st Century, we are still constantly confronted by this ‘spectre’ of a “local African cultural and artistic community” in comparison to a “local Dutch” one? Do you appreciate that by even suggesting “Africa,” you imply an entire continent, against a specific country in western Europe? With all that we know about the world and geography, I don’t think a reductionist view of Africa as a country is permissible any longer. The continent is too complex a being for that. It will therefore be quite unfair, on the part of the Netherlands, if we’re to pitch this multilayered landscape of visual culture in “Africa” against a “Dutch locality” that is largely homogeneous yet, albeit gradually becoming ‘tolerant’ of other cultures and orientations. If however, we’re to consider the specific art worlds in the local contexts of Accra and Amsterdam, then we can claim that there is quite more vibrancy on the latter scene than the former. But this is said in the knowledge that the ‘artscape’ in Accra is not mediated or state funded in any way and that most efforts are privately initiated and supported and are largely artist-led – what in the Dutch context might be considered ‘alternative.’

- Ghanaian artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson, in response to a question that attempted to compare 'African' and Dutch artistic communities, despite one being the largest continent with a population of over 1 billion, and the other a country. This brings to the forefront underlying preconceptions re: Africa being one homogenous entity.

The interview - on Dutch magazine Metropolis M's website - is definitely worth reading as Akoi-Jackson talks about race, belonging & globalisation in reference to international art residences.

[browngirlbigdreams]

Tonight I got to see Afrofuturism: Artists on three Continents Explore "Black to the Future" Photography by Bernard Akoi-Jackson