This intervention examines the relationship between art and ethnography-archiving in galleries and museums in West Africa. It focuses on how image-making is a mode for reconstituting the past. I am concerned with how in post-revolutionary societies stories of radical change are erased or told.
Paper Abstract
In November 2023 Nuku Studio’s Center for Photographic Research and Practice in Tamale, Ghana opened the exhibition "Routes of Rebellion," an exhibition of my films and audio-visual media. The works-- many of them collaborative-- explore how revolutionaries transform our perception. The works draw on the aesthetics of anti-imperial cultural and political movements from the 1970s through 2000s, tracing the paths that radical artists, athletes, and thinkers travel in confronting power. I use images and sound to challenge narrative conventions and experiment with storytelling by blending documentary, fiction, music video, and experimental techniques. I will discuss this exhibition as a way to blend the ethnography and aesthetic.