A Diagnosis of Time: Unlearn What You Have Learned is a collaborative effort of SCCA Tamale (Ghana) and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Denmark).
The exhibition stems from a conceptual framework on time as a plastic and non-linear medium, focusing on materials, objects, and processes embraced by the artists with a sensibility to our contemporaneity. In this show, we explore ideas related to modernity, technology, history and ecology, embodied in the works presented and the sites involved.
A Diagnosis of Time presents a total of thirty-three works assembled from varied sources. This includes contemporary artists from Africa and the diaspora, a selection of contemporary art from ARoS’s collection, and works of modern art from the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board’s collection. The exhibition also features certain cultural and scientific objects from collections of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board and of the Museum of Archeology, University of Ghana.
The exhibition is networked across three sites in Tamale: SCCA Tamale, Red Clay and Nkrumah Voli-ni and one site in Accra: The Workshop, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra. A lineup of live and virtual activities – workshops, film screenings, discussions and more will expand on the exhibited works.
The founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, saw it necessary to save the legacy of the structure and preserve the stories told behind it. To those who were born in the 1970s, 1980s, and the 90s, in Tamale, the story of Nkrumah ‘volini’ was part of the stories told to children.
Located at Nyohini, three-hundred (300) metres away from the Abedi Pele roundabout, Nkrumah ‘volini’ has been believed by the locality to have some form of spirituality surrounding it.
Ibrahim Mahama to give Nkrumah Voli-ni (SILO) a new facelift
Before the fall of Nkrumah in the 1966 coup d’état, he was on a mission to building silos across the country to solve the post-harvest loss of farm produce and also improve the food security in the country.
The silos after his fall have been left to rot and some sold to businessmen at various stages of construction. No successive government has actually continued with what Nkrumah strives to do with the spaces.
Ibrahim Mahama spirit resonates with that of Kwame Nkrumah | Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson is a Ghanaian artist who lives and works in Accra and Kumasi. She is currently a Ph.D (Painting & Sculpture) student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana.
Tracy Thompson’s work for “Orderly Disorderly” dissolves styrofoam in its parent, petrol, to generate these rigid-gooey forms. What drives her interest is how such an opaque polypropylene can have varied transparencies and bubbly effects when it comes into contact with petrol; a material that was birthed out of years of geological pressures and G-forces of the earth to the point that our organic kinship with it seems forgotten. Her work opens up the contradictions of how elements of nature can in turn become toxic to itself.
BlaxTARLINES Kumasi
Thompson’s work has featured in ‘Cornfields in Accra’ (2016) and ‘Orderly Disorderly’ (2017) — two large scale exhibitions organized by blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Accra, Ghana. She has recently participated in the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennial (2020) in South Africa.
Ibrahim has hopes to build a future from the history left behind by people who had a great vision about society. He believes our past if brought to this present day, can give us an opportunity to redirect our future to an amazing experience.
As a creative artist, Ibrahim Mahama did not leave out the fact that the way we think affects how we do things. This he said that, by his weird imaginations, he hopes to bring those abstract thoughts to life in his works.
The renowned Ghanaian artiste has since the opening of the SCCA, held two art exhibitions there, with the first centered on the works of Kofi Dawson and Akutia retrospective exhibition of Dr. Agyeman Ossei’s works which also featured heavily at his Redclay studios respectively.