I'm Presently Absent

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Bio & CV

Bio

Kelvin Kweku Haizel’s artistic practice spans painting, conceptual photography, and archival interventions. Beginning his photographic interests with an ontological question – what is the object of an image? He develops experiments in manufacturing images via the expanded field of the photographical. From snap to staged, documentary to archival inquiry, his approach to image has been consistent with his interest in the speculative potential of the materiality of images. He mines through the diverse ecologies within archival images as ways of unsettinling the dependency on fixed narratives in colonial images. It is a materialist attitude towards the production of images that sides with the multiplicity and plasticity of the image in its phenomenological manifestations. Haizel’s materialist attitude to manufacturing images has resulted in different bodies of work that has shown in exhibitions in his home country Ghana and internationally. His work has shown in OderlyDisorderly (2017), Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017), Stellenbosch Trienniale (2020), ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (2021), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2022), MARKK museum, Hamburg, as part of the 8th Hamburg Photography Triennial (2022). Haizel also participated in Documenta Fifteen as an artist through the blaxTARLINES KUMASI collective. He was a research scholar at the Northwestern University on invitation of the Black Arts Consortium in 2022, during which period he focused on images in response WJT Mitchell’s notion of the desire of the picture. In 2024 he was invited by Thinking Tools, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and MORPHO as a resident artist to further his research into the ecologies within colonial archives. He continues this experimental approach to painting and imaging through subversions, decoys, and speculations.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Candidate: Kwame Nkrumah University Of Science And Technology (KNUST) Kumasi, Ghana.

MFA. (Painting and Sculpture). 2017: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science And Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

BFA. (Painting and Sculpture) 2010: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science And Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Solo Exhibitions

2024: “The Gestures of Happiness” Solo Exhibition at Gallery Farrah Fakhri, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.

2024: “We Do Not Sleep To Dream” Solo Exhibition curated by Ato Annan at Gallery1957, Accra. Ghana.

2022: “Archive of Experiences”. Solo exhibition at the Museum am Rothenbaum-Kulturen und Künste der Welt

2019: “Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom” A solo exhibition curated by Urs Stahel in Zurich, Switzerland.

2018: “A Fish Story”, A filming event organized in response to the historicity of Socovia, in the Comoros Island. Comoros Island

2017: “things and nothings” solo exhibition held at the Old Knust Museum. Ghana

Biennales, Triennials, Quinquennials

2022: “Documenta Fifteen”. Participates as a member of the blaxTARLINES KUMASI Collective, Kassel.

2020: “Stellenbosch Triennale” The maiden edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale curated by Bernard Akoi Jackson and Khanyisile Mbongwa in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

2017: “Afrotopia” 11th edition of the Rencontre de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. Musee de Bamako, Mali.

Other group exhibitions

2023: “Worldmaking” Group Exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Chelsea, New York.

2024: “Untitled III: The African Family” Gallery1957, Accra, Ghana

2022: “Beautiful Diaspora/You Are Not The Lessor Part”. Group exhibition at the MoCP, Museum of Contemporary Photography,

Chicago.

2021: “This is not Africa: Unlearn what you have learned”. Group exhibition at the ARoS Aarhaus Art Museum, Denmark.

2019: “Lagos Photo Festival” Showed in the 10th anniversary of the Lagos Photo Festival themed “Passports”. Lagos, Nigeria

2018: “SpectacleSpeculation” An art exhibition curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh at the Ablade Glover Hall. Ghana

2018: “Afrotopia” 11th edition of the Rencontre de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. Restaged in Africa Museum,

Netherlands.

2017: “Bizindalo: Art & Technology in Africa” Group show at Funcahal’s ‘Casa da Luz’ investigating strategic narratives on Africa and technology. Madiera, Portugal.

2017: “Orderly Disorderly” Group show organized by blaxTARLINES in collaboration with Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra, Ghana

2017: “Something Played” Group exhibition curated by Selorm Kudjie. Ghana

2017: “Art in Process” Group exhibition organized by Gallery Sol. France

2016: “Cornfields and Accra” Group exhibition organized by blaxTARLINES in collaboration with Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra, Ghana

RESIDENCIES

2024: MORPHO, Antwerp, Belgium

2023: Gallery1957, Accra, Ghana

2022: Black Arts Consortium (BAC) artist-in-residency, Chicago, USA

2022: Hyde Park Art Center Residency, Chicago, USA

2021: Museum am Rothenbaum-Kulturen und Künste der Welt residency, Hamburg. Germany

2020: La Condition Publique, Roubaix, France.

2019: Moroni, Comoros Island.

2015: Asiko: 5TH International Art Programme, Maputo “A History of Contemporary Art in Maputo in 4 weeks”, Maputo, Mozambique.

AWARDS

2022: David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award

2018: Young contemporary photography “A New Gaze 2” presented by Vontobel Art Commission, Switzerland

2015: Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Art: 2nd Runner up.

LECTURES/WORKSHOPS/ ART TALKS

2024: Lecture: “On Simultaneous Multiplicities”, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

2022: Black Arts Consortium (BAC) artist-in-residency art talk.

2022: Hyde’n in the park: Reflections on the desire of image. Art talk at Hyde Park Art Center

2022: Artist talk at the Museum am Rothenbaum-Kulturen und Künste der Welt residency, Hamburg. Germany

2022: In Conversation: Kelvin Haizel and Dr. Robert Hanserd of Colombia College Chicago. MoCP post-opening programming for the exhibition Beautiful Diaspora/You are not the lessor part”

2022: SAIC Parlor Room lecture series. (Zoom)

2021: Art Talk: Embracing the Traumatic in the Aesthetic Unconscious. In company of Tracy Thompson, Eric Gyamfi and Wolgang Tillmans.

2021: Lecture to Graduate students of Photography at SAIC taught by Dawit L. Petros (Zoom)

2020: ‘Photography in an Expanded’. Lecture at the Stellenbosch Academy of Photography and Design

2019: Presention at the Research Center for Material Culture’s (RCMC) workshop on the topic ‘Beyond Representational Certainty: Rethinking the Future of the Afrika Museum’.

2013: “Dubois in Our Time” sound and video art workshop organized by Nubuke Foundation in collaboration with University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Uzora Projects and VAN Lagos, Nigeria.

2012: Global Crit Clinic, FCA, Accra, Ghana

PUBLICATIONS

Monopol Magazin. Documenta Fifteen edition. Ein Künstler Der Uns Augefallen Ist.

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (2022) The Artist as Historical Materialist: Kelvin Haizel Exposing the Photographic Real.

https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/the-artist-as-historical-materialist-kelvin-haizel-exposing-the-photographic-real/

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (2021). Indeterminate Images. OVER(2), 34-45.

Siddhartha Mitter (2020). Stellenbosch Triennale, a Bold Experiment. The New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/arts/design/otellenbosch-triennale.html

Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackon (2020). Stellenbosch Triennale: Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us. Edited by Khanyisile Mbongwa (Cape Town, with Tip Africa Publishing Ltd), Exhibition catalogue

Katrin Schregenberger (2019). Kunst ist ein Witz. Aber ein komplexer. Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/afrikanische-kunst-kelvin-haizel-gewinnt-vontobel-preis-ld.1466675

Jens Hinrichsen (2019). Glaube an die verandernde Kraft von Kunst. Monopol Magazine. https://www.monopol-magazin.de/barrierenund-blutiger-ernst

Christoph Heim (2019). Auch Fische brauchen Zartlichkeit. Tages-Anzeiger. https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/kultur/kunst/auch-fischebrauchen-zaertlichkeit/story/29970286

CONTEMPORARY AND Print Edition No.9 (2018). You Are Already In It: Looking At A Global Diaspora. Pgs 32-33

Afrotopia (2017). 11th Edition Rencontres de Bamako, Biennial Africaine de la Photographe. Exhibition catalogue, pgs 32-33

I.U.B (2017). Notes on Kelvin Haizel’s ‘Things and Nothings’… https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/notes-on-haizels- thingsand-nothings/

CCA Lagos (2017). Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa. Pgs. 8-11

Monday, May 9, 2022

A Troublesome Inheritance

"Beautiful Diaspora/ You are Not the Lesser Part”

Curated by Asha Iman Veal

"A Troublesome Inheritance“ is inspired by an eponymous letter written by Graham Coop Davis (Professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California) to the editor of the New York Times in 2014, in support of David Dobbs’ review of Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” 2014. The letter was initially signed by 139 geneticists of diverse race, ethnicity, nationality etc. and provides a united front to the fight against the resurgence of scientific racism being pushed by persons on the right-wing of the political divide. It is indeed an egalitarian gesture that is necessary to counter pseudo truths aimed at entrenching fallacies of racial hierarchies.

My installation is a visual commentary on Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History”. It adapts Wade’s title with a slight twist, making it “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes Race and Human History, Art Review”. In line with my practice, this textual adaptation is translated into braille form and this braille form is further translated into a sculptural installation made with wooden frames, chrome balls on wax-print cloth, and LED lights activated by motion sensors. The adapted text in braille form results in 139 braille dots, hence 139 chrome balls in an expanded sense.

Another silent yet present feature in this installation-as-commentary is the subtle reference to the duplicated mythical Sankofa bird stamped in the wax print proposed by the philosopher kąrî’kạchä seid’ou in his curatorial statement for exhibition “Silence between the Lines: Anagrams of emancipated Futures” 2015. seid’ou proposes a new reading in the duplicated mythical bird as “attempts to grasp what it might have forgotten from futures that are to come”. This is a departure from the notion of the lone Sankofa as understood in historisist-contextualist terms as he describes it. It is in this spirit of emancipated futures that this installation finds its critical voice in the collective critique of commodified racial narratives espoused in the curatorial ethos of the exhibition "Beautiful Diaspora/ You are Not the Lesser Part”. The show is Curated by Asha Iman Veal at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (MoCP).

Kelvin Haizel A Troublesome Inheritance, Installation detail. Beautiful Diaspora/ You are Not the Lesser Part,
at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (MoCP Chi). 2022. Image courtesy MoCP

Kelvin Haizel A Troublesome Inheritance, Installation view. Beautiful Diaspora/ You are Not the Lesser Part,
at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (MoCP Chi). 2022. Image courtesy MoCP

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Birdcall961:Appendix C (2020)

Birdcall961:Appendix C

Produced on site at the Stellenbosch Triennial Curators’ Exhibition in 2020

Birdcall961: Appendix C was produced on site at the Stellenbosch Triennial ‘Curators Exhibition’, 2020. It is an 18m x 6m x 2m multiple mediums installation. This project is a kind of montage that brings together four image forms (a reportage video, charcoal drawing, an LED light drawing, and brailled pictures) to cohabit the same surface. All these forms have a mock-documentary characteristic that alludes to the hijacked Ethiopian airplane which crash-landed in the Comoros Island (1996). In line with my practice of de-centering the ocular as the privileged mode of accessing images, this constellation, further complicate the experience of image through sonic and tactile forms. The image forms at play are transformed into unsure immanent things through the artistic decisions that bring them onto one surface.

All images by Kelvin Haizel

Babysitting A Shark In A Coldroom

From the solo exhibition (2019) resulted from wining the Vontobel award for young contemporary photography. Curated by Urs Stahel and Luisa Baselgia

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation view. Image credit: Bene

This body of work which includes video installation and photography, was developed in the Comoros Island while exploring the idea of encounters in unfamiliar geographies. I travelled to all four islands of the Comoros archipelago (Ngazidja, Nzuani, Mwali and Maore) in two separate visits to experience the island region which I first heard about through the Aljazeera documentary “Island of Death” which captures the migration crisis occasioned by the French annexation of the Mayotte. Surprisingly the archipelago, which is hardly ever visible even on geographic maps became the center of attention in 1996 until it went back into relative obscurity. On November 23rd that fateful day the Ethiopian airline flight 961 which was hijacked twenty soon after it took off, crash-landed in its waters. It made headlines because it was the most fatal airplane hijacking incident prior to the 9/11 attacks. To make the fatal event even worse for the obscured island, the need to preserve 124 bodies from 15 different countries meant that the only coldroom on the island had to be converted into a temporal morgue. This resulted in the collapse of the SOCOVIA cold-room after it housed the corpses. It also affected the major source of economic activities for the youth on the island.

I staged this performative photographic series in that now-defunct coldroom for the series titled Babysitting A Shark In A Coldroom, inspired by the hijacking and an comic illustration by Baba Yussif, a Comorian activist, whose work critique the continued French occupation of Mayotte. Additionally, I filmed the ocean from where the crash occurred and superimposed transcripts of conversations between the hijackers and the pilot onto the video. Together with a downloaded news reportage of the crash captured by a tourist on the beach, I installed both videos on four decommissioned economy class airplane seats.

The project produces its own fictions based on these encounters with such events, places, people, language, narratives, and so on. At the same time it escapes the dependency on such encounters for its meaning by allowing the play of multiple image forms to become the fulcrum of engagement.

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation detail. Image credit: Bene

“Our present theme « to dream, to imagine » brings the concept of ‘virtual time’ to my mind. And the image that goes with it is artist Kelvin Haizel’s « Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom » (2018) photography series.
For me the image, with all its paradoxes, impossibilities and contradictions, speaks to the radically new laws of visuality, of perception, and of cognition by which our digital paradigm sets for us. Truth is vital and necessary. But the experience of the world today, especially in terms of images, renders the classical truth-false binary inadequate.

The digital image (whether pictorial, sound, gestural, or in any other codified form) connects us to infinite dimensions in terms of time and space. Therefore to dream or to imagine in a world such as this could be a very powerful and emancipatory gesture.”

Text by curator and writer Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh as part of his virtual project in collaboration with LABO148 titled New Cartographies: Letters from the “Whole World” (2020-2021) on the theme ‘to dream, to imagine’

Works in this installation

BASIC I, No. 1-15, 2018 Inkjet print mounted on oval-cut dibond 38.7 x 58.4cm each.

BASIC II, 1-6, 2018 Inkjet print mounted on dibond 92.6 x 139.7cm each

Birdcall961: Appendix B, 2018 Two-channel video installation with aircraft seats. 16.05min

Saturday, April 24, 2021

Maria Kappel Blegvad in conversation with Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.
Installation view. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum

Maria Kappel Blegvad: Ironing Out difference, is presented in this exhibition. It features twenty-four ironing boards covered in canvas besmeared with abstract Pollock-like markings. On the surfaces of these you have added images in orange, all with identical wooden frames in the size of an iPad. When looking closely at these, one sees that you have also embossed text in Braille. Why have you chosen to work with all these layers and various kinds of styles in a single piece? How does this mixture of elements connect to the title? And finally, what does the Braille text refer to or say?

Kelvin Haizel: It looks like you made sure to load your glove with enough questions before swinging, but I will do my best to spar with you. To begin with, I must say you describe the formal elements pretty well and I suppose the associations you make by referencing attitudes of the post-war art (Euro-American specifically) from the 1950s until their transitioning from the Modernist epoch into contemporary art proper occurred pass quite well. But since I situate my practice in the contemporaneity, I think I can get away with one cliché by asking us to look for the devil in the detail. Beyond formalist readings, which could even lead one astray into the allusions to Pollock, Ironing out difference could in multiple folds be a proposition to iron out differences (pun intended). It can also be stretched out to be an invitation to engage a discourse of difference, perhaps more intensively, on both symbolic and material textures. The series of paintings/objects is born out of my keen observation and fascination with transactional processes from commercial paint retailers in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. These retailers mix paint according to the specifications of the individuals who are their clients. Whether it is for a person buying paint in a small tin or a business concern buying in bulk, such as the quantities needed to paint multicomplexes, these retailers serve their clients with great attention. What is more fascinating is that these retailers test each mixture of paint on the walls at the entrance of their stores. These colour swabs then create complex layers of paint over the years. It was these non-art procedures that I appropriated into my own process. I distributed raw canvases to these retailers across the cities of Accra and Kumasi and asked them to smear their paint swabs onto the canvases instead of on their walls. Thus, a certain direct correlation between painting as mark making and painting as a by-product of an economic activity emerged out of the engagement, which resulted in the canvases that you refer to as ‘pollockesque’. What one might consider painted canvases covering the ironing boards are a by-product of these commercial processes from the local paint retail economy. Devoid of any notion of representation, the gestures are somehow ‘pure’ in the sense that they emanate from people who are going about their business with no recourse to artistry. The work takes off from this economic basis on which the layers build up with each transaction. Stretching them over the top of the ironing board is a droll way to transliterate the verbal expression of ‘ironing out differences’ into a sculptural dimension on the one hand and also a way to introduce text to the sculptural object on the other, since the dock provides an island for that. As you rightly described, the dock, which would have been the part that receives the most heat, now bears Braille elements, being paragraphs taken from various portions of Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization (1964). And it was purposefully selected because of Nkrumah’s proposal of a materialist approach to egalitarian politics in this book. But that is as far as I go in volunteering further information on the Braille element. The form invites publics to learn the language system in order to access what is referenced, otherwise it is equally valid to engage them as pictures or perhaps veils with nothing behind them. It hints at the responsibility of learning as a necessary step to flatten out the creases (to wit, ironing out differences), in order to better engage one another. Will you consider my dance steps as a fair attempt or need I bust more moves?

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.
Installation detail. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.

Installation detail. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum

MKB: Thanks a lot, I am very pleased with your thorough answers and deft dance around my many questions. With regards to the latter, I understand that I have to do some mental exercise and learn Braille in order to receive the last key required to unlock the final layer of your piece. However, if I may, I have one last question in my glove that I would like to throw in your direction. Could you please explain why you, in addition to the ironing boards, also chose to add a series of light bulbs installed with motion sensors so that they light up whenever someone enter the space.

KH: First of all, this light installation is part of a new body of work that I am currently developing tentatively described as “highlights and exposures”. This series of sculptural installations are similarly created by translating parts of ‘important’ texts into Braille form and following the logic of cell arrangements in Braille to produce what I will think of as “estranged sculptural forms” made with lightbulbs and other materials. Lightheartedly the work borrows from the attitude of ‘highlighting’ essential words, statements or arguments whilst reading. So one is literally encountering a highlight when you are exposed to this constellation. But it also finds a reading in photographic language where highlights are produced, resultant to exposures. The motion sensor is present to activate that exposure, the moment of encounter with light. Perhaps we can think of it as another kind of photographic apparatus but one that does not translate subjects into ‘corpses’.

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.
Installation detail cropped. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum

Note

This interview was originally published in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" exhibition catalogue. The exhibition opened to the public on 21st April 2021 at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Ironing Out Difference

Five years ago I started some experiments, hanging canvases on the walls of paint retail shops across Accra and Kumasi (two of the largest cities in Ghana). In these shops, the workers manually mix the desired paint colors and test them on their walls for their clients. As a result, there is always a buildup of layers of paint which I find very unusual and exciting. Various textures (visual and tactile) begin to form from the buildup over time. In many ways, it inspired a way to return to painting that might be closely associated with the traditional medium itself but at the same time depart from it in other formal ways. The sort of artistic intent or gesturing associated with painting is relinquished to the dictates of spontaneous testing. The picture is not determined by an artistic intent, but as a consequence of people’s desires to give their walls a new look plugged into the economy of paint. It is a kind of picture that evolves from an "unthought thought, a thought that cannot be attributed to the intention of the one who produces it" to borrow the words of Jacques Ranciere[i]. What pictures does the economy of paint paint? How do I evolve from here? Some experiments are underway. This is just a sneak-peek into my studio.

Note

[i] See Jacques Rancière, "The Emancipated Spectator (Verso,2009)

Friday, May 1, 2020

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh in conversation with Kelvin Haizel: on Imaging, Imagining, Dreaming, and more.

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (IUB): What does it mean for you to be able to dream and/or exercise imagination in the context of your artistic work?

Kelvin Haizel (KH): My art practice revolves around the image (in both still and moving form) and just like dreams or imagination, gravity can give way to the free flow of signs in these spaces. The 1992 Hollywood film “Death Becomes Her” directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Meryl Streep (as Madeline), Bruce Willis (as Dr. Menville), and Goldie Hawn (as Helen) offers an excuse to respond. In the plot, both Madeline and Helen drink a potion which gives them eternal youthfulness, on condition that they take care of their bodies. But what they soon find out is that they became living corpses of themselves after drinking the potion. Their eternal youthfulness is only preserved through death. And since they no longer had Dr. Menville to run routine repairs on their bodies they became Frankensteins of their old selves. In the closing scene, they both fall from a staircase and break into several parts, and Helen’s severed head asks Madeline’s where she parked their car. Isn’t this potion akin to photography in its attempt at preserving life only by bringing death to its subjects (àla Barthes)? In essence, they enter a space where natural laws do not apply. They became photographs. They escape reality to where gravity has no hold on what is possible. And isn’t that exactly what dreams, imagination and even nightmares, afford the living? Perhaps it is the way dreams and imagination, like images, can circumvent the force of gravity, that offers the most liberating potential for me in my practice.

IUB: In a way, what you describe reminds me of Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' where a semblance of eternity is preserved in a painted portrait. How does this perspective you derive from mediums such as photography and cinema (with the literary example as well) shape your conception of time-- literal, virtual, fantasy, etc?

KH: It is interesting you mention ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Although I am yet to read Oscar Wilde’s novel, I have treated myself to the 2009 British fantasy-horror drama film titled ‘Dorian Gray’ after Wilde. In this film, the young Dorian Gray’s painted portrait is not only a representation of him, but it also becomes the real thing that ages (affected by time) while Dorian himself remains youthful (the perfect picture). However, whatever Dorian Gray does affects his portrait. For example, when he cuts himself, it is the portrait that bleeds. This is to say that the Picture is not just a dead or frozen moment in time; it lives parallel to, participates in, and affects reality. It is an eternity that lives in the temporal. Something even more exciting happens; Dorian’s scars prior to the portrait also disappears. Although eternity is, in a sense, a moment which lasts forever (unchanging), his is an eternity that goes through changes. It is as though the picture crosses over to the mortal world to edit itself— like an eternal God coming to die and resurrect. One could relate it to how pictures of today cross over from screens into our literal space as Hito Steyerl suggests. We could also turn to the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius for a second. Just as the judge of Zeuxis’ genius was signaled by a bird, Dorian’s decaying portrait was hinted at by maggots. Furthermore, in Zeuxis’ painting, the bird flies into an illusion of painted grapes, whereas in Dorian’s portrait one maggot drops from the portrait and lands in front of Dorian. In this sense, the portrait does not only pierce through the screen into reality, but reality also pierces into the eternal picture to affect it. Time in this regard is not conceived as moving from The Flintstones to The Jetsons, but in the more complex sense of heterochrony. I guess these are some of the things I pay attention to as I decoy images in my work.

IUB: Right, Wilde’s novel comes to terms with such immanently conflicting notions of time. Taking you up on the “decoy”, how exactly has this technique been employed in your work? Since your oeuvre involve layering various image forms, perhaps you could demonstrate through a particular work how this is achieved?

KH: I’m glad you took the bait! My most recent work “Birdcall 961: Appendix C” (2020) which was presented at the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial earlier this year should suffice. In this project, a line drawing is made by cutting a path into an 18m wall of plasterboard and lighted with an LED light strip. It appears to be a light drawing (another kind of photograph). And the path is also not arbitrary, it is a transcription of the path made by the Ethiopian airline flight 961 as it hovered in the sky until it crash-landed in the Comoros Island (1996). The path indexes hours of movement plotted into a single moment. It becomes a bundle of time spread out before one’s senses. No longer a succession of unfolding activities. Unlike a ‘whatever-Wood’ film where centuries are compressed into two hours on the big screen, here, not even a millisecond is lost. The entire duration of the hijacking ordeal is encountered in a single burst of light. In principle, this could even be an experience that relates to, and at the same time surpasses, real-time processing given that while the light drawing is only a skeuomorph, it is also a bunch of codes that temporarily find their material expression in the LED lights and plasterboard in the exhibition. There are no delays, the codes transcribe duration without breaks, the moving image becomes one with the still, duration becomes an event.

Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation view. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation detail. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel

IUB: Did this work involve sound?
KH: Indeed, not only sound but the tactile sensation of braille-as-image is also brought unto the same surface to complete and perhaps complicate the total picture. Siding with other senses to escape
the “stifling hegemony of sight” (Bonaventure Ndikung)i, my approach to the image has always been, however subtle, to disturb this over-dependence on the ocular. In the work cited above, transcripts of the conversation between hijackers of the airplane and the pilots were translated into brail form and fixed unto the same surface occupied by the light drawing. In this way, sound finds its loudest expression in image terms via the silent tactility of the brail form.

Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation detail. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel

IUB: Fascinating. It seems to me that the image operations at play in Birdcall 961: Appendix C — whether as sound, felt, still, or moving— at once point to sources beyond themselves, in terms of the quasi-documentary approach, while moving beyond this kind of conformism to verisimilitude with the freedoms exercised in the artistic decisions to transform them into ambivalent image-things in their own right. Now let me zoom in on your work with moving images. The postproduction work Bangbang33ii (2016) is a silent video where you summon a similar poetics by highlighting the tensions at play between still and moving images. Tell us about the techniques and methods used in this work as well.

KH: Sure, but please permit me to take a slight detour before I jump into this piece. In Thomas Neil’s attempt to offer a kinetic theory of the imageiii, he dismisses the conception of the image as mimetic, a representation, a copy, and so on; to which I also subscribe. He proposes that the image is “the mobile process by which matter folds and reflects itself into various structures of sensation and affection”. Essentially it is a folded matter. Image is then not extrinsic to material, it is, in fact, all material. My approach to the work Bangbang33 shares a similar logic. To produce another possibility of a material manifestation of the image received by way of digital technology. The piece is a 20minutes moving image developed from an initial 1.32 seconds 720p video, downloaded from YouTube. The otherwise hurried viewing of the latter is substituted for the delayed contemplation of the former. By increasing the duration of the video from 1.32 seconds to 20 minutes on the editing timeline, the moving image slowed down completely into what seemed like still frames pulsating into being. What would have been sensed in seconds now lasts 20 minutes and moves at a painfully slow pace causing the frames to behave at certain moments as if it is a still composition. Also, it remains a “poor image” per the class system of images as it gains weight in terms of file size (something associated with HD, 4K, and other higher classes of images). One could say, its digital matter had folded unto itself too many times through the duplication process the video goes through as duration expands. In effect, its weight inhibits mobility; both as moving image sensed on a screen, and as a digital file to share from one device to another. Consequently, Bangbang33 approached stasis as it gained weight relative to duration. To infer from Neil’s proposition then, Bangbang33 is paradoxically matter folded unto itself too many times, thus appearing both as still and moving image.

Kelvin Haizel. “Bangbang33”,2016. Exhibited in Spectacles. Speculations... 2018. 20 minutes. Video still. 60' flatscreen monitor. Installation view. Image courtesy Kelvin Haizel.

IUB: And so, in a sense, this visual image is always in the process of becoming: it is both still image and moving image, and not any of them in particular. Let us move on now to the braille. How did this felt image come to factor into your system of montages and what does it give to your work?

KH: It was initially a gift from a friend which took my interest in that direction. In 2016, while developing a piece with sign language at the Disabilities Department at KNUSTiv, I became friends with a young woman who was visually impaired. She told me she woke up one morning to a mild headache and ignored it as a familiar sensation. On her way to lectures that day she collapsed and woke up completely in the dark. Having learned to live with it, she recognizes me by my perfume anytime I am close by and always feels my hand to confirm my presence. Towards the end of my sign project with them, she gave me a medicine package with braille embossment and read it to me as an indication of how she 'sees'. It was the first time I had noticed that this pattern of raised dots which shared the same surface as the printed text, did not conform to the syntax of the printed information. That was the moment of epiphany for me, realizing that the braille contains ‘folds’ directed at expanding possibilities for symbolic communication. The interest for me now is how it can complicate notions of visuality that privilege sight as it cohabits pictorial surfaces. Even overlapping in most cases. The network of relations it brings to the picture always requires one to learn anew. If anything has been more transformative in my approach to the image, then all credit goes to this gift I received. It is this transformative potential in the gift that manifests in these montages as you describe them.

Kelvin Haizel. "Untitled: Brailled medicine packages", 2016. Shown as part of my MFA thesis exhibition “things and nothings”. Installation view. Image courtesy Elolo Bosoka

Kelvin Haizel. "Untitled: Brailled medicine packages", 2016. Shown as part of my MFA thesis exhibition “things and nothings”. Installation detail. Image courtesy Elolo Bosoka

IUB: Now, what can you say about the potency of dreaming and imagining— particularly if we consider that we presently inhabit a world in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

KH: We find that the consequence of this pandemic has transformed our entire social space. Sociality has instantly become a taboo in the realm of the physical, leaving us to regroup only online. We experience one another as pictures. Indeed, we have all literally been translated into pictures. The emergent consolation to this loss is to Zoom in groups, and the way we have learned to cope is to #challenge ourselves to imagine ways to stitch, collage, montage ourselves, and transition from one picture to the next. #dontrushchallenge #fliptheswitchchallenge to name just two. For me, imagining anew is a prerequisite for a post-corona world. What we are left with, is to join Pinocchio in dreaming it was real again. But given that the world that transformed us into pictures might no longer exist, we are compelled to invent another reality, another world. If we think of this pandemic as a portal, as novelist and dissident writer Arundhati Royv has described it, a portal could equally return us to the world that existed prior to the crisis. COVID-19 is something like a solvent, an acid that is dissolving the old world. However we emerge out of it, it will be interesting to consider in what ways we will continue to learn to live as pictures.

*** This interview forms part of the virtual project Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is collaboratively developing with LABO148 titled New Cartographies: Letters from the “Whole World” (2020) on the theme ‘to dream, to imagine’. See more on https://www.labo148.com/nouvelles-cartographies/

Notes

i See Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “Of a Photographic State of Being: Delivering the Photographic from Photography”. Streams of consciousness: A concatenation of dividuals. (Berlin: Archive Books, 2019)
ii Banbang33 was featured in the exhibition Spectacles. Speculations... curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh in 2018. See more information here https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/spectacles/works/
iii See Thomas Neil, “What is an Image”. Theory of the Image. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
iv Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.
v See Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”. Published by Financial Times. April 3, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca