ELOLO BOSOKA: Sabala Kotoku, and other structures, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe

The Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Art Center in Ettlingen, Germany, welcomes Ghanaian artist Elolo Bosoka for his first solo exhibition at the institution. The exhibition brings together a comprehensive selection of the artist's practice, featuring installations, photographs, and mixed-media works created over the last few years.

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Elolo Bosoka's works, assembled in this exhibition, seem to draw a map of the artist’s movements over the last few years. Spanning from Copenhagen over Clermont-Ferrand and Karlsruhe to Kumasi, and now temporarily anchored here in this room in Ettlingen. But rather than being easily traceable to one of those places, they create somewhat of their own, third locality between the very specific origin and context of their materials or photographic impressions on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the bodily presence they demand in the here and now. Maybe one could describe it as drawing a map through the perspective of the things. Even though we mainly follow Bosoka’s view - through a camera lens, a paint brush, or his hands reshaping materials through heat - we also stumble upon momentswhere the things look back at us, obscuring our vision and recounting their memories of the unknown collaborators and places that also had a hand in their shaping.

The everyday life is maybe one of the most prominent anchor points of Bosoka’s practice. Probably more than half of hisprocess actually takes place outside of the studio and is based in mundane actions and encounters. From the choosing of the materials by asking people for their old, used coal bags and exchanging them for new ones, for example, throughwalking through a new place to find and photograph compositorial situations, to collecting and asking friends for old tickets and receipts. There are no neutral materials. Elolo Bosoka turns the traces of usage into painterly gestures. He is approaching the found object not as the purpose-giving artist but rather with a curiosity for the hands and places it haspassed through before and the marks they left, now merely adding his own entropic gestures to the mix and giving thematerial a new form.

From an art historical perspective, Bosoka claims to keep returning again and again to some of the questions of the sixties. He is working around, expanding and deconstructing the aspects of the modernist painting as discussed by Clement Greenberg, as well as the minimalist questions of sculpture, materiality and seriality. The flatness of the surface of a painting is either intruded on by scratches in former floorboards, expanded on by collage-like elements of everyday items appearing in the painting, or completely liberated from the frame as plastic fabrics get returned to their materiality, hanging as soft sculptures in the exhibition space. Bosoka’s paintings are leaving the framed formats, now relating to the limitations of the room itself and enchanting the viewer into their painterly reality. The frame, on the other hand, relieved of its structuring function, also gets to stand on its own - somewhere between an architectural and a sculptural element, reminding us of construction scaffolding, and questioning the size of our body in its relation to the work and the room as we see it.

Through their opaque surfaces, Bosoka’s works withdraw themselves from a supposed neutrality. They need the bodily presence of the viewer to become activated. For example, in the netlike structure of the Sabala Kotoku (Eʋegbe for „onionsacks“), forcing the eye to either focus on the thousands of tiny frames through which to see the blurry schemes of the works and people behind it, or to focus on said background ghosts, turning the orange material into an incorporeal colour-field painting, laying over the room. Or, in Painterly Objects, the fluidity between the photographed reality and the painted surface - our material reality seeping into what we can only assume to be a found situation somewhere else.