Atsala Tsala is an exhibition featuring five artists who use mixed media to explore identity, history and the recycling of everyday life into art. Suggested by Marcia Kure and Serge Attukwei Clottey “Atsala Tsala” means patching, stitching and even collage in the Ga dialect (Greater Accra region). It is a technique that each artist in this show has, in some way, applied to their work. It also reflects the grouping of these five artists who come from different parts of Africa.
Wall based work from Serge Attukwei Clottey from Ghana, will be exhibited alongside photography by Omar Victor Diop from Senegal, Marion Boehm, a German artist who works in South Africa, Marcia Kure from Nigeria and Cameron Platter from South Africa. Individually, each of these artists presents a unique personal vision while together, they offer an exciting overview of contemporary African art.
The Ghanian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey made a vivid impression last year in his work, My Mother’s Wardrobe, when he walked through Accra wearing the clothes of his recently deceased mother. His witty yet profound performance made a bold comment on the inequality of African funeral customs whereby a mother’s belongings are traditionally only passed on to their daughters. Clottey is also known for his sculpture and installations made from the ubiquitous yellow plastic jerry cans used to collect and carry water.
These recurring cans represent the ecological and economic hardships facing Ghanian working people but also the strong role that women play in ensuring their families have clean water at a time of poor resources and high levels of pollution. The works absorb a political narrative as much as they do Clottey’s personal history and formal approach to assemblage.
Whereas Clottey has spent his life in Africa, Marion Boehm was born in Duisburg-Rheinhausen, Germany, and moved to South Africa in 2010. Like Clottey her work often pays particular attention to the role of women in African society. Her exquisite collaged portraits merge recycled antique fabrics, shweshwe cloth, newspaper, pastel and graphite, elevating otherwise ordinary women into dignified figures of great beauty and individuality with an aim to redress their exclusion from art history. She includes pictorial elements from stories told to her by people she has met while she has been in Kliptown reflecting their histories alongside her own experience of living within their communities.
Marcia Kure, originally from Nigeria is now based in the US. The notion of moving away from Africa, and her home, has allowed her a critical distance to view her ethnicity and history from an outsider’s perspective. In her paintings and drawings Kure utilises a distinct linear style that echoes Nigerian Uli art and uses traditional pigments such as kolanut and coffee affording her semi-figurative images with rich sinuous layers of earth tones. The sense of postcolonial, fragmented identity is palpable in Kure’s mixed media collages that effortlessly combine elements as diverse as female identity, historical costume alongside contemporary clothing and hip hop culture.
