The title of the present show is an allusion to Late Night Jazz’s 2019 music off the 1,000 Choices Can't Be Wrong album. Among other things, two points stand out. The electronic beat seems like a collage of soundscape taken from different spaces. It feels as though you might have encountered strands of the sound somewhere. In the background, the emerging sound is like something is being cut with an industrial machine. It flashes and vanishes. Then almost 3 minutes into the music, the background and foreground merge and a flute-like sound starts and files the listener out of the piece.
Space is something that Issah as an artist is keenly interested in and studies actively. Using Kumase, the Asante regional capital, and other urban spaces, the artist makes sketches and photographs of what he will ordinarily do and see. This is where the artist’s interests in material cultures unfold. He finds inspiration in colours and forms in the city’s object culture such as finishings of metal pots (that sit on top of makeshift kiosks), looming gate grills, burglar bars, billboard signages, windows and flags. From his immediate living environment, he finds uses in henna and posters.
If we are to believe Marxist spatial theorists, cities, as spatial entities, are both symptoms and producers of social relations. Writing as an introduction to his book Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, Professor Ato Quayson asserts that space is an organising principle. Taking the two together, we are led to ask: what are the social relations and organisation, and historical antecedents that produce the object culture that the artist is interested in?
In 1817, British writer Thomas Edward Bowdich traveled to Kumasi to negotiate a peace treaty on behalf of the African Company of Merchants. A year later, he published a book1 in which he said that there were nine entries/exits to and from Kumasi. Out of the nine roads, four led towards the north of Kumasi. At the apex of its imperial power, Kumase became a cosmopolitan space with a heterogenous ethnic composition.
The sin of the empire opened Kumase up to many influences and disrupted social composition. Maryse Condé speculates in her novel Segu that Mande mercenaries joined the Asante army. In the 19th century, for example, the Muslims (distinct from Asante nkramo (Muslims)) were formally incorporated into Asante polity and placed under Nsumankwaahene, the spiritual adviser to Asantehene. It is these engagements, interactions, encounters, and influences of social relations that produced what artist and art historian Atta Kwami has called ‘visual language’ available to the ‘Kumasi realists’.