philosophers, and say what he did, I am amazed everyone did not just get up and walk out. RB: How should or could Africa and the West relate culturally? NOA: I did an exhibition in Norway, a few years ago, collaborating with artists from Norway and Ghana. It came out of a residency I had been doing there. We had just found oil in Ghana, at the time, and the Ghanaian government asked the Norwegian one to be her mentor in the process. I made a film to explore the narrative of this partnership and how oil was affecting our communities here. What emerged for me was that what, in the West, is known as ‘progress’, is referred to as ‘development’ in relation to Africa. Words are so important because they implicate us in our prejudices. Progress is directional and purposeful, whereas the developing world is seen as trying to catch up, having fallen behind. Until we have an equality of exchange, or of looking out into the world, there will always be an inadequacy in our relations. RB: You wrote in 2011, in an essay for Frieze: “Art becomes another language through which one’s reality is mediated to the world.” It seems, in the West, that we have forgotten what art is for; it is perceived as a luxury to be owned. The implication of your statement is that art is not a luxury, but instead it is essential to human existence. Do you still think this is the case? NOA: When I came home to Ghana, I found
art everywhere and in everything: imminent, ubiquitous, porous. When I visited a museum in the West, I would come across objects I saw at home, dead and locked up in glass cases; but really if you look, wherever you are in the world, art is everywhere, to differing degrees, and to differing standards. I do think it is a necessity, a way of understanding and mediating the world. RB: So, if art is removed from society, first by being made separate, as has already happened in the West, and then finally by being amputated entirely, as austerity policies are threatening to do, what will we be left with? NOA: Stalin is credited as saying that, “The writer is the engineer of the human soul”, and the same must be true of all artists. Plato, in his Republic, expressed that art should be censored, and this happened in Stalinist Russia of course. There was a curfew on music in Ghana in the 1970s; art was contained because it was understood to be powerful. When there is a desire to control in government, the first thing they seek to control is creative expression. History has shown, though, that creativity always finds a way up through the cracks. My dream is to have a cultural revolution here in Ghana and in Africa as a whole, because I think, to a certain extent, there is still a cultural inferiority complex. I don’t want to apportion blame by saying this; in the end we are responsible for our own realities. I dislike the colonial shaming and victim mentality. I find it disempowering, but we were told, for a long time, that our culture
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and even our souls, were inferior, and we took this on board. Art is a way to bring a new consciousness into being for us. There are so many forms of expression that are so natural to us that we don’t even see them, and this is why I am working on the Cultural Encyclopædia. I want to make those forms of expression visible. RB: But how can this be effectively communicated to the communities of power that do not associate with this message? NOA: I feel like the seismic shifts in paradigm, which have occurred in the past at times of revolution, have always been underpinned by a coming together of creative minds. Before the Russian Revolution, Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky were talking the language of revolution before it was born in actuality. The same is true of the French Revolution with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, which brought disparate minds together. Here, there are, and always have been, many different voices creating unique and valuable insights. Bringing these voices together is my intention in the Cultural Encylopædia. I think the thing is to create and, at some stage, things begin to speak for themselves, they just have to exist—CCQ
anoghana.org gallery1957.com The next show at Gallery 1957 is Zohra Opoku: Sassa 25 May – 1 August 2016