Am I invited?

A series of art exhibitions to take place in private living spaces

 2015

Works by kelvin haizel

You Are Invited

In Ghana, there is a common social rite of etiquette that revolves around food and its eating. This pertains in nearly all the diverse cultures that make up the country’s cultural identity. When one person meets another “knocking their mouth,” (an Akan euphemism used to refer to the act of eating), the guest may ask rhetorically, “Am I invited?” it is then expected that the one eating, responds: “you are invited,” as a sign of their acknowledging the guest’s presence. As Alba Sumprim suggests in her book, “The Imported Ghanaian,” (2011). This short call-and-response affair is by no means an actual invitation to join in the meal. It is only a polite gesture that suggest that the two people have seen each other and do acknowledge each other’s presence.  That is where the story usually ends. In one of Sumprim’s anecdotal narrations that deals with this social charade for instance, she as the guest who meets someone eating, decides to literally respond to the invitation, to the utter shock of he who invited her and all witnesses in the restaurant in which this ‘taboo’ act, was to play out. She later acknowledges, however, that her rather pragmatic intervention was a jovial prank she pulled, to get at the root of a social rite that she sees as largely hypocritical.  In such a situation where a genuinely hungry person is invited to partake of food, only as per the demands of etiquette, likens the invited person to biblical Moses who sees Canan from a distance, but does not set foot there. This is how I see the relationship between contemporary Ghanaian art, artists, the few private galleries and the Ghana National Museum. It seems all these spaces of exhibition are proverbial Canans that contemporary artists can only see, or know about, but don’t get to show in.

As suggested earlier, there are a few commercial galleries that display artworks for sale (i.e. majority tourist oriented paintings and figurines) and souvenirs in Ghana. Artists in contemporary practice are challenged to figure out their own spaces whether conventional or alternative, to exhibit their work. It is therefore even arguably right to say that “alternative spaces” have been our default exhibition spaces in the Ghanaian context, due to inadequate mainstream galleries and an significant museum system. Also, there is usually not any space that can accommodate the specific forms being explored in the practice as is pertaining in contemporary praxis. Site specific art installations and interventions ask such questions regarding traditional display strategies and their alternatives. Increasingly, artists do consider the relevance of the exhibition spaces to the work, such that the space does not become a merely temporal host to the finished work.

Certain practitioners in the current art dispensation harbour an erroneous view that the traditional gallery and museum culture should be operated by curators, critics and the theoreticians who chart the necessary conversation around art.  Susan Myers suggests, in an article I read recently online, that there is a flawed speculation that “concepts and vocabulary needed to discuss artworks are a reserve of formally trained critics and curators.” I share in in her view.  Exhibition can be conceptualized and executed by anyone who is interested in presenting art to people in the way they think responds to the political, social, aesthetic concerns of their times.  Like how the field of human psychology is not always the sacrosanct preserve of counselors for instance, but should accommodate the likes of streets hawkers, taxi drivers and simple passersby, so do I see the field of art too, having opened up to anyone who has a genuine interest in its growth.  In this sense, all are invited to participate. But are all willing to literally answer the invitation? And in terms of curating, I am by this project suggesting that anyone can “volunteer” and attempt curating a showing of my work in the context of their own private living spaces.

The work

I have been grappling with an idea. What is the relevance of the individual as part of a larger community? And what is the effect of this individual as a community unto oneself? This stems from my early experience of boarding school. Being one who went to boarding school very early in my schooling (ie; from primary level onwards), my school mates and I had to deal with a claustrophobic physical space that was communal in every sense of the word. Individuality was a luxury. In such an over populated space, my only form of escape was through imagination. I often created multiple characters of myself to experience another kind of community where I dictated the existence and role of the characters.  The former and the latter communities have become the focal subject of my recent work. The work manifests as fictive and tangible forms of mild memories, existing as physical objects, prints, installations and interventions that comment on personal and public socio-political issues concerning inclusion and exclusion; of access and intrusion and privacy. The interventions manifest in various clusters: full or half face P.O.P casts of my face in different colours, situated in space by hanging, lying, ‘served’ in a porcelain plate, encased in wooden frames; lino print images of my face with acrylic washes; wax print cotton cloth wrapped around wooden door frames; plain cloth with marker drawings and writing.

Your living space, my artwork

When we move into a new apartment/ house, we are excited about how we furnish the place and what effects it should have on our visitors. Before long this world would become too familiar; we will usually stop caring for it and seeing the subtle changes our living spaces go through; we will defer cleaning till a more convenient time, yet this may not even come. 

I’m thus excited for my work to be exhibited in people’s living spaces. The work is expected to occupy a place of unfamiliarity, affect the mundaneness of the private living room, for example, and change it to a place we might want to savor throughout the time of the exhibition until it becomes too familiar again. Even though we hardly document our living rooms on a daily basis, this particular intervention will give “volunteers” the opportunity to document their living spaces before, every day during the period of the exhibition and the day after the exhibition closes. The actual exhibition opening may be a private or public affair. The “Volunteer” may decide to have friends or even the general public attend the opening and subsequent showing days as per convenience and agreement with the “Artist.”

The Volunteer

The “Volunteers” are the people who will “host” the showing of the work in their living spaces for a period. They are required to literally “curate” the exhibition, bringing in their own experiences and leanings. Prior curatorial knowledge would not matter. The conversations that ensue will then be documented and collated for publication at the end of the series of exhibitions. My interest here is investigating how the rigid forms of my work could assume conceptual flexibility enough to interact with people’s personal narratives in the contexts of their living spaces. So from an “Artist” to the “Volunteer,” “Am I invited?”