ELOLO BOSOKA: Containers, SOL Nexø
For his first solo show in Denmark, Ghanaian artist Elolo Bosoka has made a bold move and covered the walls inside the galleryspace with his emblematic compositions made from reused plastic-mesh onion sacks.
The large work is neither an installation nor a sculpture. And despite its obvious painterly qualities, it is not a painting either – it exist somewhere in between these genre definitions. Rather the work functions as a relational informant, bringing us closer to the market. Market here understood as an actual geographical location, more precisely the central market place in the city of Kumasi, Ghana, where Bosoka lives and works, and wherefrom he has sourced the onion sacks from local vendors. But also the marketunderstood as a metaphor for something less concrete, namely an attitude towards art that melts notions of geography, trade, materiality, social theory and contemporary (art) history.
In the exhibition we see an interest that flows from the work and into the space it inhabits. As part of the exhibition, Bosoka has carried objects found on Nexø harbour into the gallery space. These objects, weathered and fragmented, are leftovers from theformer fishing industry, and will soon be a rare sight, as the harbour area currently is undergoing a redefining sanitation. By moving the old ropes, nets and buoys (now out of use) into the gallery space, Bosoka moves our attention from their functional value to their aesthetic value, letting us look at them with fresh eyes: as colors, shapes, textures and shadows.
Bosoka here turns and twists the idea of the white cube as a neutral space (container) for independent art works; in his work the self-referential doesn’t exist. Instead it reminds us of the manyfold networks we humans are part of; the economic, social and emotional webs constantly at play in our daily lives. By deconstructing onion sacks, originally made for one sole purpose(transportation of onions from the farmer to the consumer), Bosoka turns our attention to the very materiality of the sacks, and to their function as ‘containers’. Containers for onions going from A to B and C – but also for the invisible stuff following the sacks on their travel; dirt, dust, economic transactions and lived experience. In this way the artist not only juggles the question of ‘content’ as something beyond the mere physical, he also reverses the hierarchy between ‘content’ and ‘container’.
In her famous essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, writer Ursula K. Le Guin returns to the idea about the invention of technology and its impact on the development of human culture. It is a common misconception, she argues, that the first tool invented by humans were knives and sticks and sharpeners, and that these first inventions of weapons thereby reveal our inherent violent nature as the main driver of human evolution. No, before the weapons must have been the carrier bag, says Le Guin. It isthe container that is the basis of human culture. Just as Le Guins carrier bag theory gives us a feminist, anti-capitalist, ecological alternative to determine what is life and fiction, Bosoka’s exhibition in SOL gives us an opportunity to rethink what it means to carry and to contain; to distribute and collect, to share and to care, to connect and to diversify, to rethink and to understand art, ecology and economy across country borders.
In the publication accompanying the exhibition we find a collection of photographs from the artist’s daily walks at the harbour area, as well as a text by Ghanaian artist and curator Franklin Yohuno. In the publication accompanying the exhibition we find a collection of photographs from the artist’s daily walks at the harbour area, as well as a text by Ghanaian artist and curator FranklinYohuno. As an active part of the globally influential artist collective blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Bosoka never works entirely alone. His work enters a tradition of radical thinking around the notion of art as a non-reciprocal gift. An approach that has been shaped by the emancipatory art teaching project by the artist, writer and philosopher, Professor Kąrî'kạchä Seid’ou.
Curation: Sofie Amalie Andersen
Exhibition views: © Elolo Bosoka
