In Memoriam:Portraits of the Middle Passage, in Situ
Ghanaian history is intertwined with the global history of slavery, with the nation having the largest concentration of old slave forts and castles than anywhere else in the world, lining its shores of the Atlantic Ocean. This same ocean is presumed to be the largest graveyard of black bodies with an estimated five-million lives lost to it during the Middle Passage. These lives, however, are largely reduced to stale paragraphs in history books, making it difficult in contemporary times to understand the scope of the enterprise. Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, addresses this in his exhibition, In Memoriam: Portraits of the Middle Passage, In Situ, which confers a vivid image of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from a local perspective.
The exhibition, which opened in mid-June at the Cape Coast Castle, displays 1 300 concrete heads that depict some of the lives that were transplanted. The body of work installed in the male and female dungeons, might be the largest by a single artist in Ghana. In his debut as a curator, African-American art historian and Fulbright scholar Daniel Dunson engineered a fitting gloomy yet reflective atmosphere to magnify the sculptures by complementing them with the poetry I wrote, printing it onto the walls of the main exhibition hall to reverberate their imagined experiences. Full article here.
The exhibition also includes a photo series by Ghanaian documentary photographers Naa Abiana Nelson and Nii Odzenma, that show smaller, private installations of the heads in the other slaves castles and forts such as the Ussher Fort in Accra before they were brought to Cape Coast.
The stretched canvas prints, also fitted in the space, symbolise the scope of slavery across the country. This careful balance of words and images creates a sullen atmosphere of reflection that clouds the exhibition space, magnifying the poignancy of the concrete heads.