The 89plus project was launched in 2013 to project the generation of artists born in or after 1989. Suggesting a correlation between significant world-changing events and increased creative production, the project brief noted ‘the year 1989 saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the start of the post- Cold War period, and the introduction of the World Wide Web and the beginning of the universal availability of the Internet’.
In 1989 Ghana, the political and economic conditions were changing. Ghana was emerging from the 1982/3 famine and the subsequent Structural Adjustment Program which consolidated the neoliberalist agenda of the Bretton Woods institutions. The country was also adjusting to the September 1989 coup attempt and a ban on Christian groups including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Jehovah Witnesses. Two years earlier, History professorAlbert Adu Boahen had broken the so-called ‘culture of silence’, an agitation that together with others, culminated into the 1992 elections. Globally, 1989 was a significant year.
The artists featured in THIS EXHBITION IS UNTITLED come from the generation that the 89plus project focused on. Far from offering a definition of what this generation is grappling with, the exhibition suggests a snapshot of the artist’s trajectory beginnings. Using the material conditions of neoliberalism, globalisation and consumerism including plastics, wax prints, call credit cards, hair, bitumen and disused everyday objects, the artists featured in this exhibition confront the failures of modernism.
If we are to believe Terry Smith, contemporaneity is a relational aesthetic comprising refashioning modernism, engaging the conditions of the present and the pluralities of the present and the future.
European modernism built on the idea that the artist is a genius. Elsewhere in the imperial project, practitioners were stripped of the ‘artist’ title and the colonial schools taught art by ‘hand and eye’. The practitioner was called a ‘craft (wo)man’ and the trained artist, devoid of engaging with the creative process.