One Woman's Path to Bringing the World to Africa—and Africa to the World
Oforiatta-Ayim says that her idea for ANO was born when she visited the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she studied Russian culture in the early 2000s. I went to the museum as often as possible with my free student pass. The Hermitage is an encyclopedic museum covering the world's cultures, past and present. What struck me first that day—and then again and again—was the lack of context around displays of historical African masks and sculptures and the exclusion of Africa among the Western and Eastern "masters" of modern art. There were apparent gaps and imbalances in the seemingly complete knowledge of the world.
TANAKA AFRICA's
African Mask-Hand-carved Gold, black and red combed bed white wood mask used in festivals
ANO Institute of Contemporary Arts is a non-profit cultural organization based in Osu, Accra. It was founded in 2002 by cultural historian, writer, and filmmaker, Nana Oforiatta Ayim and aimed to uncover, discuss and collect traditional and modern Ghanaian community facets with the help of a mobile museum traveling through the country.
Before opening formally as a cultural space in 2017, ANO had been functioning as a revolutionary art movement for years. Oforiatta-Ayim says that the new space comes as Accra's arts scene is experiencing a renaissance: "The exhibition is going to help us look at who we are in this city, in this country, at this point in time. Our generation is out of the post-colonial phase and is now reacting to the colonial. I'm obsessed with the idea of revolution – cultural, social or political – and the idea of writers and artists sitting in a room and dreaming up what a new reality might look like. I feel we're in that moment."
External funding is hard to secure, and studio rents are expensive, so artists are adopting public spaces as an alternative outlet. However, ANO did not come magically from anywhere. Oforiatta-Ayim states plainly: 'it's been hard, but it comes out of a necessity. It comes out of the fact that I wanted to be in control of my narrative, both as a woman and as an African."
The institution indeed comes about as a necessary element in matching the increased interest in the arts by enthusiasts, exhibitors, and collectors worldwide. As such, art practitioners in Ghana are thrilled about this addition to the few accessible traditional cultural spaces where they can shed light on their processes and products. Individuals and organizations looking to connect with creative forces building beyond the margins of art constructs currently in Ghana view ANO as a viable content hub.
Mobile Museum by Latifah Iddriss, ANO, March 2017.
As a writer and lover of the arts spending time growing up between Europe and Africa, Oforiatta-Ayim's idea was to create context as an artist after she realized that context had always been created on behalf of Ghanaians. The curator and writer juggles management of the art institution with collaborations she is putting together with other Ghanaian artists and has a novel with her dream publisher, Bloomsbury.
For Oforiatta-Ayim, exhibitions are a form of storytelling. She looks back at her debut exhibition 15 years ago at Liverpool Biennial and is content with the results so far. The adversities do not perturb her despite the challenges. Obstacles included insufficient sources of funding, difficulty in getting the 'right people,' and the fact that the highly patriarchal nature of the industry in Ghana undermines women spearheading such art functions. 'Now that the foundation is laid, I will go into the creative aspect of things. Although the organization is capable of sustaining itself, the new government is showing some interest in the creative arts, and that might be a good sign.
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Oforiatta-Ayim's latest project attempts to decolonize the concept of an art gallery by facilitating the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives, and representations from and about the African continent. She calls it a Mobile Museum.
ANO kickstarted the mobile museum from May 2018 until August 2019. It toured all ten regions of Ghana. The mobile museum stopped in towns and collected material culture from each area by asking for keepsakes, photos, jewelry, antiques, and heirlooms from the locals. These items were displayed in the mobile structure in the context of their backstory and uploaded into the pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia. The mobile museum was located in the center of each town.
Edward Biney discovered Obuasi gold. He brought this pot back from London almost a hundred years ago. | © ANO Institute of Contemporary Arts' Oforiatta-Ayim hopes that through displaying personal objects in an egalitarian fashion, she and others in the community can engage together with their living histories in open ways. We're trying to upturn the idea of why we give particular objects value and not others. Y "our object, your letters, your stories have as much value as those of the conquerors," she says. "We always have [in museums] this one golden object that is the most valuable. Well, who gets to say what's valuable if it's valuable to this family?"
The Cultural Encyclopedia is represented as a digital platform and in published volumes. It intends to provide a foundation for alternative development narratives by generating, collecting, and sharing knowledge. Oforiatta-Ayime intends to document all significant cultural touchstones in the thousands of years of African history through an online resource that includes an A-to-Z index and vertices of clickable images for entries. Oforiatta-Ayime is making the Cultural Encyclopedia an "open source" to prevent it from having a "top-down logic." She indicates that there is not the abundance of records she had been looking for as history is a static thing to be written down. Instead, it's a living expression told through festivals, celebrations, heirlooms, and music.
As an example, Oforiatta-Ayime mentions her interest in Ghanaian drum poetry, an ancient language spoken through percussion instead of words, which, as she describes it, places "the past, present, and future into one dimension." "The Western and Eastern systems have been quite clearly documented. But in terms of African systems of making sense of the world, there are so many, and they are so incredible—they just haven't been translated," she says. "It's almost like a vacuum, even though it's so powerful."
TANAKA AFRICA's
Tree Trunk Twin Drum- yellow wood and cowskin
Kyebi, or Kibi, the capital town of the East Akim Municipal District in the Eastern region of southern Ghana, is one of ANO's mobile museum declared stops. ANO aims to reconnect the threads of rich traditions and versatile craftsmanship in the area during the two weeks they will be stationed there. Artists, cultural historians, and academicians running collaborative research with the locals, holding conversations with traditional rulers about the Eastern region's historic and modern artistic contexts. Another stop is Cape Coast and its suburbs.
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Tracing its origin to Chale Wote
ANO opened up the novelty of a non-stationary art exhibition structure at the Chale Wote Street Arts Festival and has developed the form and reach to a broader audience and purpose. The ideology goes hand in hand with the digital and print Cultural Encyclopaedia for Africa on which Nana Oforiatta Ayim works. In an interview with Akinyi Ochieng, she states, "I realized that the arts were a more potent tool for transformation than politics. I got more and more into the idea of changing narratives through art."
Making an exhibition along the way
The mobile museum asks, "how would local Ghanaians like to express their culture to whom and in what forms, institutions and contexts"? The structure is folded, kept on a truck, and remounted in each township.
An alternative presentation of culture
ANO's mobile museum challenges the mainstream portrayal of art via white cube representation. It proposes an inherent structure and medium that unpacks original African content and talents. Nana's work involves impressive dialogue that defies stale narratives by bridging the gap between contemporary urban voices and rural genius. "Coming from the African continent, being creative, and having a vision of how things can be better, is what you hold on to and gives you the energy to continue despite all the obstacles day-in, day-out. You're born in a certain context, so you must do your best to make it a better place. That's what drives me."
TANAKA AFRICA's
African Mask-Hand-carved Yellow Black White Wood Mask, used by Novrongo tribe
Oforiatta-Ayim was born to a Ghanaian family whose parents raised her between Germany and England. She recounts how the childhood trips back to Ghana opened her eyes to something magical. "It was almost like flying into a different world. I would go back to my hometown, which is up in the mountains, and it was always mythological," she says. "My gran would tell me how my grandfather would turn himself into a cat at night." And her grandfather was king of the Akyem Abuakwa region. He fathered 110 children from 42 wives, including her mother, the last one born. "My great-grandmother became a king because there was no one better. There are stories of her breastfeeding her twins as she is riding into battle."
TANAKA AFRICA's
African Wood Sculpture-Gigantic Giraffe, hand-carved of white wood, Ghana, West Africa
Oforiatta-AyimIn the British museum, you have the African galleries, and it's like, 'This drum is from 1500 Ashanti,' but there is nothing else about it. You don't know for what it was used, from what context it was taken, how it was brought here, who stole it. The museum as it exists today is so much an imperialist project and is so much about power," she says. "At the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, there would be some random masks in one room and in another room some amazing Picassos, with so much more context about the Picassos than the neglected masks. I remember being young and thinking; I want there to be more."
Description of the Akan Drum at the British Museum:
Drum (Apentemma) goblet-shaped https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am-SLMisc-1368open drum with a hollow pedestal, the main body made of wood (Cordia Africana), with six wood pegs (Baphia nitida), a skinhead (deer or antelope?) and cord made of two primary vegetable fibers (Clappertonia ficfolia and Raphia) - among others - which is around the head of the drum and attached to the pegs; there is a coating on the wood of proteinaceous glue and ochre-containing iron oxide pigment. The top half of the drum has pegs and no decoration. There is a raised ring with vertical lines carved around the middle of the circumference of the drum. A decoration below this raised ring consists of carved notches, which divide the drum into three vertical sections. Within those sections are rectangular or square designs that are alternately blank or with carved vertical lines. The foot of the drum has no design.
TANAKA AFRICA's
African Drums Large Twin Drum Set-"Heart Beat of Africa" hand-carved of yellow wood and cowskin
Her dedication to Ghanaian culture stems from her search for identity. "I grew up speaking Twi and English and German. I was never fully Ghanaian; I was never fully German; I was never fully English. When I was growing up in Germany, people would speak to me here first in English even though I speak fluent German—you have brown skin, and therefore you don't belong," she says. "Ghana is where I most obviously belong, and yet there is this amnesia of knowledge in that I can't just go to the library and pick up a novel about Ghana in the same way I can pick up a novel of Russian 19th-century life with Tolstoy." It is in and of itself a legacy of colonial oppression that so many of our cultural institutions do wrong by and, in some cases, ignore African history. When pressed on the satisfaction, she feels in devoting her own life in real time to Ghanaian culture, she gets sweetly misty. "All of us long to belong in some way, to someone else, to a group of people, to a story. It's like there's a door, and I can't get into whatever the room is. But if I get the key—my history, my past—and I can open that door, it won't just be a room on the other side, but the whole world."
TANAKA AFRICA's
African Wood Sculptures Modesty Statues of Man and Woman
Next year, Oforiatta Ayim will publish a novel, The God Child, with Bloomsbury that will fictionalize her perspective on her country. After all, Oforiatta Ayim's attempt to educate the world about African heritage has taught her even more in so many respects. "When I go to the villages, there is such wisdom," she says. "When I sit next to a grandmother in a village in Ghana somewhere, and she might be 100 years old, I'll feel that she has this incredible serenity. She'll ask me my name, and I'll tell her, and she'll start telling me this poem about it, that my name means 'a cool stone in a forest.' As she tells me these stories, that sense of belonging, timelessness is about being grounded and rooted, but also free."
The Mobile Museum team embarked on a "listening and learning tour" across Ghana's regions, exploring how culture impacts their lives with participants from communities and across generations. The country requires infrastructure, which will be archived on the Cultural Encyclopedia website and ANO social media platforms.
A Nigerian family in Accra in the late 30s, (c) Deo Gratias / ANO
The Mobile Museum structure toured each region for two weeks. Each first week was dedicated to collecting and documenting materials, including objects, documents, photographs, oral histories, political histories, living spaces, typologies of space, etc. The mobile museum spent each second week exhibiting those objects in the Mobile Museum with the discourse around specific issues in each area underpinned by engagement with artists from each region.