ABSTRACT:
This review focuses on Frederick Ebenezer Okai’s exhibition Light Soup, which took place in Kumasi between October and November 2021. The show featured not only clay objects but also sound and video projections as well as the very space in which the works were exhibited. In addition, the artist served soup to visitors. In sum, the exhibition was a multisensory experience. Liberation and community were foregrounded as artist, space, objects, and the public became equal players in a theater of sorts. These interventions constituted the strategies Okai employed to activate a sense of belonging and freedom. The review points to some of the highlights of the exhibition. It also discusses the methods that the artist used to gather his material, as well as the processes he employed in executing his multi-disciplinary. The artist’s courage and irreverence are captured in the bold manner in which he gestures to the revolutionary in a spirit of play. At the center of Okai’s practice is the opening up of the aesthetic experience so that it touches everyone on common ground.
Frederick Ebenezer Okai (b. 1986) is an artist who operates from Accra, Kumasi, and Sunyani in Ghana. He works mainly with clay, exploring the medium’s plasticity and the potential it holds as an expression of both ephemerality and permanence.1 As a practice-led researcher and studio-oriented artist, Okai engages the various pottery cultures in Ghana. By learning from pottery making collectives and communities throughout Ghana and harnessing a growing repertoire of forming and finishing processes, he has been focused on unearthing the multiple ways in which indigenous and contemporary approaches to pottery relate to lived experience. His method involves collaborating with these communities in a spirit of equality and sharing in the commons. A major source of influence for his practice is the emancipatory and revolutionary teachings of artist and pedagogue karî’kạchä seid’ou at the Department of Painting and Sculpture in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.2 Okai is a lecturer at the Department of Visual and Industrial Art in the Sunyani Technical University and a member of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, a project space for contemporary art located within the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST. This article reviews the exhibition Light Soup that forms part of his studio-based PhD in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST.
The intention of making an aesthetic experience common to all resides at the core of Okai’s artwork. The “commons” is a concept associated with recent artistic practices that proposes access and participation on common ground.3 And when this happens in Okai’s practice we are able to witness, in “real” form, the coming together of rather disparate communities to activate fecund processes of creativity and liberation.
Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 restrictions and protocols, the exhibition Light Soup stood out in Kumasi in 2021. On Wednesday October 13, 2021, Okai opened the exhibition at the Old Tech-Sec, a venue at KNUST.4 The exhibition ran until November 30, 2021.
Okai (2021), in his curatorial statement, succinctly described the exhibition as “an immersive art installation that explores the engagement between objects and spaces.” Its provocative title, Light Soup, no doubt drew visitors to the exhibition.
Prior to the opening, a general buzz had already been created via several social media outlets, particularly the blaxTARLINES KUMASI WhatsApp page. What was the public to expect of an art exhibition so titled? What was this light soup going to be made of? What spices? What proteins? What vegetables would make up this serving? And then again, how do we even know if soup was the thing that was being served? The attraction was strong, not so much because of the promise of food that the title held, but rather because some people were already familiar with Okai’s studio-based research and artistic practice that cannot be easily categorized.5 His work with clay is wedged somewhere between the actions of hand pinching and coiling; the whirling and turning of the throwing wheel and the building of hefty grog-impregnated ball clay sculptures around which kilns have to be constructed before they are fired. Okai’s practice is informed by artistic, commercial, and academic concerns. He locates his art making within the elastic possibilities of working with clay, thus encompassing ceramics, sculpture, and pottery. The methods Okai employs while conceiving his projects are a mix of critical anthropology, history, and geography along with play, irony, and experimentation. The statement he prepared for his exhibition opens on a light-hearted note and is written in Pidgin:
Like play like play we dey make art. We dey roam, we dey do investigation through dialogues and observations. We dey collect objects so say we go fi reimagine am. We dey follow minute details as we trail in the shadows of a search, seeking the momentary spikes the search reveals. The journey generates diverse art forms. Like play like play, all be the art (Okai 2021).
His decision to open his statement in Pidgin, which is not the language one would expect in the context of a venerable institution of higher learning (KNUST), is a revolutionary act. This gesture encapsulates the spirit of play and experimentation, and momentously disrupts the pristine sanctity of the academic space.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors walked into a kiln built on site with fired bricks and mortar. It simultaneously served as site and as object. The space showed signs of possible collapse, and this added to the sense of precarity. In doing so, Okai presented the viewer with an experience of certainty and uncertainty; the kiln was tentatively held together by fresh-smelling mortar made from laterite and various cellulose fibers. Okai’s fingers marked every square inch of the space (Figure 1). The visual and tactile textures, as well as the earthy coolness that first embraced visitors, was welcoming and stayed with them, but only for a moment. The cool was indeed short-lived because, suddenly, a balmy heat set in, and the visitors began to perspire.
Frederick Ebenezer Okai. Light Soup. Pot made by joining shards from a variety of indigenous pottery, with red fairy lights. Photo by Frederick Ebenezer Okai, 2021.
The multi-media installation filled the entirety of the studio/gallery space, implicating the floor, walls, and ceiling and even expanding beyond the physical dimensions of the room. And even though it was adequately immersive, the experience was not overwhelming. Okai’s display strategy allegorizes gallery and museological methods, but with witty and unexpected twists. Some of the vessels and pots are exhibited whole on museum-style pedestals and with conventional wall texts, sometimes indicating some sort of provenance, a geographical or even biographical fact of the vessel’s creators.
Okai had also invited the participation of Geoffrey Akpene Biekro (a.k.a. Captain), an artist who experiments with culinary and relational forms, and who offered the visitors actual bowls of goat light soup at the opening of the show. The public, therefore, had to navigate the exhibition while savoring the aroma of the soup (Figure 2). With the space so utterly shaken up, there is no denying, as set out in Okai’s statement, that the ideology of the white cube is what is most under scrutiny in this exhibition.6
Frederick Ebenezer Okai. Light Soup. A visitor shows how members of the public move their bodies to interact with the space as site and object. Take note of the means for exhibiting and labelling two of the pots, which refer to museum display strategies. Photo by Bright Dagbe Ahadzivia, 2021.
Apart from the calculated disruption of the pristine and monolithic space of a typical modernist gallery, which privileges exclusively aesthetic rather than a phenomenological experience, what confronts the public is a heterogeneous amalgam of idiosyncratic object constellations and clusters. Sounds distract and disorient the visitor now and again. Moving images flood the gallery, projected onto uneven and highly textured surfaces. The room is softly lit with a few spotlights focusing attention on some of the objects. Red, blue, or clear fairy lights have been integrated into the interior of some of the objects (Figure 3). The artist says the glow from within represents the “souls” of the vessels.
Frederick Ebenezer Okai. Light Soup. Re-configured pots hanging from above. Note the video projection on the textured wall within the show and the effect of the red and blue fairy lights. Photo by Frederick Ebenezer Okai, 2021.
To construct this rather tranquil space, Okai has had to embark on extensive research expeditions that have taken him across the length and breadth of the country. Pottery items and clay vessels from both indigenous and contemporary spheres have been collected by the artist from a variety of locations throughout Ghana. Some have been deliberately broken into fragments—shards that the artist gingerly collaged together with polyurethane glue and seared with darting flames from a propane torch; some are drilled and sutured along the faults and jagged cracks, through which the fairy lights give off their colored glow; others are precariously reconfigured into porous vessels that obviously could no longer hold any light soup. Okai has created exquisite monstrosities that are staggered and suspended from above (Figure 4). They may only superficially index deterioration, but what is noteworthy about the objects and the space is how they constitute a compelling possibility of parallel existence and interaction.
Frederick Ebenezer Okai. Light Soup (2021). Public holding clay bowls of goat light soup as they interact with the show. Photo by Bright Dagbe Ahadzivia, 2021.
And why does Okai break almost all the pottery and vessels before he painstakingly reconfigures them? In piecing them together out of the heterogeneous collection of fragments, no particular pot or vessel retains its initial form. In this sense, the reconfigured assemblage becomes a precarious embodiment of novelty, uncertainty, and even mystery. That these paradoxical notions can be contained in their inconsistencies and still speak to a perilous sense of harmony is the essence of Okai’s oeuvre. This gesture differs quite significantly from the Break Pot performance practice of Amy Lee Sanford, who also breaks pots and reconstructs them. In her case however, it is the very same pots that she breaks that she then reconstructs.7 Though her work also speaks to the notion of trauma, the re-mending of her pots is approached in a more restorative, peaceful, and harmonious way.
With the exhibition Light Soup, artist Frederick Ebenezer Okai boldly gestures to the revolutionary in a spirit of play and daring. Liberation and community are celebrated as artist, space, objects, and the public are served light soup in literal and metaphoric terms.
Footnotes
↵1. For further material on the artist see Nortey, Okai, and Bodjawah 2013; Nortey, Wamuaja and Okai 2014. Okai’s work was also exhibited recently in UmStand der Dinge: A State of Affairs (2019) at Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg, Germany; for more information see https://www.hfbk-hamburg.de/en/aktuelles/kalender/umstand-der-dinge-state-affairs/ and https://m-bassy.org/en/journal/a-state-of-affairs.
↵2. Arguably, kąrî’kạchä seid’ou can be credited as the architect of the Emancipatory Art Teaching project which is transforming the curriculum of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST. seid’ou is the artistic director and co-founder, with Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu and George Ampratwum, of blaxTARLINES KUMASI. For more about his crucial role as mentor and philosophical inspiration to the millennial generation of artists and curators trained and being trained in Kumasi, including faculty colleagues. Akoi-Jackson (2017) offers a brief review of some of seid’ou’s work, particularly his pedagogical strategies, observing how they resonate with the pedagogy of eighteenth-nineteenth-century French mathematician, Joseph Jacotot, as presented in the writing of Jacques Rancière (1991).
↵3. The “commons” and the “real” as used here, relate to the use of these concepts in Dockx and Gielen’s edited volume, Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, 2018.
↵4. The venue of the exhibition is itself a curiosity. The Department of Painting and Sculpture has literally squatted in this part of KNUST for close to 10 years. Within the campus of the university is the site of the former secondary school associated with the university. This location has, in recent years, been “unofficially” occupied by the Department of Painting and Sculpture, due to a dire lack of studio spaces for their students across their Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs, numbering in the hundreds. The former classrooms of the secondary school are repurposed as studios for the students of the Department. It is in one of the studios that Okai put up his exhibition. The function of these spaces oscillates between studio and exhibition sites.
↵5. His research and art making are also the focus of Okai’s PhD investigation in Studio Art.
↵6. The document I am referring to is the joint Artist and Curatorial statement. The KNUST experience challenges practitioners to experiment with or complicate the roles of artist, curator, writer, historian, or critic, as the need arises. As well as having produced the work collaboratively with colleagues and people from the various communities, Okai also curated the exhibition.
↵7. Amy Lee Sanford is a Cambodian-American sculptor. For more information about this artist, visit Sanford’s website, http://amyleesanford.com/about/.
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