Confronting the present, Yussif Musah’s larger-than-life self-portraits wrestle with death or the idea of it. In a politically charged world where black boys and girls are lynched every day, Yussif manages to capture the anxiety of living as a black person with no evidence of violence. In a sense, he escapes the stern criticism of Teju Cole’s opening lines of his 2015 essay, Death in the Browser4:
‘There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror’.
Musah’s self-portrait scenes merge the documented (from the public archive/ memory such as books and dreams) and the speculated (through play). The performance of the death anxiety is one that is euphemismised with picking of flowers, vulture attack and human skeletons.
Bernice Ameyaw’s installations thrive on gathering and fabricating disused objects. In the time of COVID-19 when we are physically distancing, the idea of gathering remains ever pertinent. By not gathering, we lose the shape and rhythm of our communities. Even at the risk of being mundane, the hope is that gatherings will become possible (again). Both Amoah and Zakari’s practice of collecting ‘waste’ materials and collaging them into figurations remind us of the lives that we have lived previously and those that we hope to live later. Zakari’s woman figurations exist with such carelessness, and sassiness, and transgression. Amoah, on the other hand, focuses on the face area that in real life is now inhabited by facemasks.
Regardless of the artist’s practice, the gallery offers the space for each of the works to be viewed in the presence of the others – in relation to the others- the present and absent. To put it in the words of Martinique writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant, the Whole-world is ‘the realised totality of the known and unknown data of our worlds’ including “all sudden presences, as well as all times and spaces of the world’s peoples”5. We should think of art contemporaneity as such.