Jeremiah QuarshieYellow is the Colour of Water

Curated by Robin Riskin 19 August — 22 October 2016

A multi-site exhibition project staged across various locations in Accra: The Kempinski Hotel, Tema Station and Kotoka International Airport

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Jeremiah Quarshie: Yellow is the Colour of Water And other propositions of Positive Impossibilities

Robin Riskin

“My Sister, it’s about yellow. Modest, organic, Soft as the music that played…”

Ama Ata Aidoo, A Falling Lashibi, Accra — 12 November 2015

Yellow is the Colour of Water is a multi-site exhibition project staged by the artist Jeremiah Quarshie in collaboration with curator Robin Riskin. Based out of Gallery 1957 at the Kempinski Hotel, the exhibition maps out to a network of site-specific interventions. The body of work revolves around questions of water and its flows through the city of Accra, as embodied through the ubiquitous yellow “Kufuor” gallons1 used to store and carry it. Harmonies and contradictions surrounding the vital resource of water are produced through poetics of potential. From within the gallery space, urban protagonists (specifically women) who negotiate these material conditions star in grand tableaux that approach apparent failures from alternative perspectives. A series of paintings presents the gallons as thrones, and the common characters who sit upon them as queens. The “Kufuor gallons” act as object and backdrop alike, framing the scene and multi-functioning as chairs, props, stage-set, and sometimes subject. Quarshie playfully inverts portraiture from a hegemonic apparatus of the elite, to a tool for raising critical questions about social conditions of the masses. Coursing out to the town, fabricated pipes and hoses intervene in currents of the city, in the form of minimalist objects attached to architectural bodies. These installations proffer ‘non-pipes’ that are somehow more perfect, more yellow, more beautifully cast than apparent ‘real’ ones. State, corporate, and public institutions are injected with industrial sunshine: a disruption to the conventional flow of things. Though the artist paints in a classical style, a tongue-in-cheek lightness conjures a mood of humour, whose sweet veneer is followed by a sharp kick. Curatorially, the exhibition aims to take painting as a political project, and the exhibition structure as grounds for inquiry and interrogation. The show presents multiple formats of painting, through not only pigments but material objects (stretched canvas, mounted billboard, sculptural pipes). Interventions take place over a series of sites—hotel gallery, public bus station, international airport, and other possible entities whose approval may or may not be granted. The process involves individuals and groups across various classes and sectors of labour. Audiences and players are implicated as hosts, collaborators, and participants. The Gallery that presents the project enters the picture as one of a constellation of points, whose territory, history and politics are equally called into question. By injecting the work into spaces already used for other purposes, the exhibition enters into conversation with shifting environments, whose experiences are formed and re-formed by the bodies that act as content and context.

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‘Manye’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2015 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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In the Pipeline: tracing the flow of portraits… Manye was the first to pose for the Yellow is the Colour of Water series. A friend of the artist’s, Quarshie chose her to play the “Market Woman”—the role of a Makola “market queen”, who leads an association of traders selling a given crop. Manye sits confidently amid an arrangement of gallons, wearing a button-down shirt and printed cloth wrap, holding a basket with egg crates and kontomire leaves. The part was acted—Manye normally works as a teacher and administrator in a school—so beforehand she had spent some time at Makola to familiarise herself with the role. Since then, more of Quarshie’s characters have simply played themselves, though still with an element of acting. A different kind of queen is portrayed by Naa Okailey Shooter, who won the Miss Ghana beauty pageant in 2012, and was second runner up for the world event in 2013. Her pose oozes cool from atop a pyramid of gallons, a “Miss World Africa” sash draped across her chest. Quarshie’s 95-year-old grandmother sits as herself, in a strict upright pose common to colonial studio portraiture. She has lived through eras of colonial rule, democracy, and dictatorship; from Brong Ahafo where she sourced water from a spring, to the Central Region where she fetched from a river, to the city of Accra where she lives today, with a reservoir on the family compound that secures a steady supply amidst shortages. Dedei, a fishmonger from the Labadi beachside, poses with pan and bowls in hand. She is an aunt of Nii Odzenma, Quarshie’s collaborating photographer, as well as of the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey (and a member of Attukwei’s “GoLokal” performance group). Keren, also a friend of the artist’s, plays her real-life role of nurse, and currently works at the 37 Military Hospital (a site whose participation in the project is still in question). Keren’s portrait was painted a few months after the doctors’ strike that struck the country last August, when care of patients at public hospitals was left almost entirely in the hands of nurses. The rhythms of work (and non-work) in the city, determined by various parties, coalitions, and leaders, might not be so far from the flows of water, whose channels are decided by authorities’ allocation of resources. The series actually began before its beginning, with a painting from 2013 made while on a cross-cultural project between Ghana and Germany. The work resonated with Quarshie’s interest in addressing shared social concerns and contrasts, regarding resources, amenities, and everyday transactions, particularly those carried by women. The image features a woman leaning over two gallons that rest inside a wheelbarrow. A twinkle of mirth rises from a moment of apparent weariness. The painting aligns with others works of Quarshie’s made around the same period, which negotiate convergences of tradition and technology: changing ways of life in the face of modernity, painted to gleaming perfection evoked by an Instagram age. Village Tech (2011) shows two young women dressed for market, an asanka grinding bowl at their feet, laptop and cell phone in hand. Market Woman’s Daughter (2012) presents a fashionable girl posing beside her mother selling fish, seemingly dislocated, as if inserted by Photoshop. 32 Muses—made for the Muses group show which Quarshie curated at the Goethe Institut, Accra (2014)—depicts a woman’s face spliced in two. Half is composed by a lattice of text and symbols, a coding of the names of 32 women who have influenced the artist’s life. Two other gallon paintings followed the 2013 work, which led Quarshie to contemplate centring a series around the concept, with the gallons as not only props but armatures. Two years later, Manye's portrait was first exhibited at the Silence between the Lines exhibition in Kumasi in 2015, which presented work by 17 artists from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in a car showroom temporarily converted into a contemporary art space2. Quarshie’s

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Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2013 Acrylic on canvas

80 x 100cm

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work was also part of the next blaxTARLINES exhibition at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Accra, titled, the Gown must go to Town…3. He has been part of a recent movement of artists from among current and recent students of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST.

Repetitions, Reversals and Returns The reversals and inversions performed by Quarshie’s project enact modes of disorientation reflected in the subjects and sites themselves. The women who pose for his portrait series may often live as the characters they play, yet their roles are produced by costumes. Obiribea, the quantity surveyor, changes from her blue dress to construction gear to pose for the picture. Whether positions are feigned or reflective of reality, each woman plays a part that she projects with signifiers. Conditions of sites where interventions are staged echo these shifting relations. Around the stretch of state grounds where the Independence Arch, Ghana Water Company and other key ministries meet rises the Kempinski Hotel, and down the road, one of its counterpoints, Tema Station. The Kempinski is a luxury premises whose grounds once hosted the popular national race course, while Tema Station is a lorry park for the masses, a part of which was recently displaced by the up-and-coming Octagon Suites, and relocated behind the National Lottery Authority. From a wider view, these establishments fit into a zone of territory that used to be known as Victoriaborg, a segregated residential and recreational area for colonial masters; an expanded leg of the city sold by the Dutch to the British in the mid-19th century. Post-independence, Nkrumah reclaimed the district as a zone of freedom, and constructed a string of state ministries and national monuments along the wide-open beltway. Whether these monuments are commemorations or simulations could be contested. Are they commemorating something that was, or was that ‘something’ ever there in the first place? Recent corporate and commercial projects have extended the land’s legacy of ambiguous positions. Places change from one thing into another, and sometimes back into themselves, but are reformed and made anew. Historic colonial territory was turned into an expanse of independence and of the masses, then flipped back into an elite oasis resituated by currents of capital. Relations between classes, spaces and architectures transform, transpose and repeat. Several districts away, state precincts established for Gold Coast military operations and later converted to public institutions are likewise earmarked by the artist as potential sites for interventions—namely, 37 Military Hospital and Kotoka International Airport. The Hospital was named “37” for the regiment that the colony served in the Queen’s army. The airport was renamed for Colonel E. K. Kotoka in 1969, after Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup in ’66. The GWC’s Accra East office lies on a quiet bend behind the hospital, where a graceful aqueduct-like structure overshadows a view of the rising Aurora Apartments, currently under construction by the Trasacco Estates Development Company Ltd. Another set of metamorphosing establishments, their histories have been inscribed by struggles for sovereignty. At the time of writing, negotiations with the institutions presiding over these spaces are pending, and the outcome of Quarshie’s project hangs in the balance.

Artist’s sketches for a billboard intervention at Kotoka International Airport, Accra (top) and a sculptural intervention on the street-side by

Tema Station, on the grounds of the National Lottery Authority

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GHANA WATER COMPANY HEAD OFFICE

28th February Rd

TEMA STATIONBehind National

Lottery Authority

KEMPINSKI HOTEL GOLD COAST CITY

Formerly the National Race Course

37 MILITARY HOSPITAL

GHANA WATER COMPANYACCRA EAST OFFICE

KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL

AIRPORT

INDEPENDENCE SQUARE

Former Victoriaborg Accra Central

Accra

Independence Arch and Tema Station in Accra Central The Ghana Water Company, Kempinski Hotel, and Tema Station occupy a stretch of grounds surrounding the Independence Square area built by

Kwame Nkrumah—formerly an elite colonial territory known as Victoriaborg

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What is the colour of water? At the height of the Dutch Golden Age—when the Empire of the Netherlands reached across the Indies, Africas, Asias and Americas, and exotic fruits, spices and silks were common consumptions of the typical merchant burgher—among the many feasts of the Dutch people were the jokmaalen: temporary inversions in which masters and mistresses treated their servants, and social roles were suspended, Simon Schama writes. The carnivalesque events, it could be imagined—not unlike the Medieval “Feast of Fools” of European clergy—projected the world “upside down,” reconstructed through its negation. In the revelling underworld described by Mikhail Bakhtin, the fool or clown can be king; man can be woman; high, low; inside, out. Positions, costumes, objects, and rags are reoriented. One opposite does not replace the other, but the two are merged into dialectic wholes. Yellow is the Colour of Water pursues this spirit of parody, in which social positions are upturned through their pictorial production, and objects’ positions with regard to reality are reimagined. Quarshie’s painting appropriates from Dutch Master and classical European formats contemporaneous with the jokmaalen feasts, as well as configurations of colonial studio photography, a tradition with roots in Ghana and other former imperial satellites. His iconography takes genre painting as a point of departure, in which a focus on common life brings the daily contributions of labourers, peasants and countrymen into focus. In Quarshie’s work, images of ordinary workers are inserted into structures of aristocratic portraiture, projecting topsy-turvy simulations in which social and political roles are scrambled. In this space, fact and fantasy mingle, borders between object and image are cracked, Cartesian certainties unsettled. Like Zeuxis’s image of Helen4, Quarshie’s portraits are formed by collaging fragments of multiple photographs into imagined compilations: singular fictions of several truths. Sculptural pipes are made by moulding concrete to the shape of actual PVCs, reproducing images of pipe-ness that supplant reality. Quarshie’s simulacra suggest an inversion in which all pipes may be non-pipes, social roles may be masks, and perhaps were never anything but a simulation of their own image. In 1929, Magritte wrote that his painting was not a tobacco pipe5. Are Quarshie’s sculptures really water pipes? Or are any of the pipes, really? The Ghana Water Company asks us, ‘How can you say the colour of water is yellow, when we are trying to say it is blue?’ This may be a reason for their non-participation in the project. The title of the exhibition is ironic, somehow contradictory, but also reflective of a certain reality. Rather than denying the truth of an assertion via negation (e.g. “The colour of water is not red”), the statement positively asserts an apparent paradox (“The colour of water is yellow,” or rather, “Yellow is the colour of water”). Like the ouroboros snake that perpetually tries to swallow its own tail, Quarshie’s positive paradox sets the proposition into a self-circling whirl that must be interrupted. For the colour of water may not be a colour at all, but it might be a refraction, or filter of what is seen through. The substance which on its own is clear, and in liquid state is shapeless, is given a form through its container: the gallons, pipes or moulds that enfold it.

Artist’s sketches for unrealised interventions at the Ghana Water Company, Accra East Office (top) and the 37 Military Hospital, Accra

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Relocations Johannes Vermeer was known for painting not only burghers and bourgeois but their servants, milkmaids, officers and craftsmen, with the same attention and reverence afforded to upper classes. With a palette Quarshie has come to share, Vermeer’s tones of umber and ochre shimmer with halation, while lapis lazuli and ultramarine are lavished upon dresses, scarves and cloths: objects saturated to perfection. Theories abound that Vermeer used optical aids to paint his flattened, slightly distorted vignettes—perhaps a camera obscura, camera lucida, or comparator mirror and concave adaptor. Images underwent a series of translations from the staged room, to its projection or reflection, then its refracted form, and finally the artist’s interpretation upon the canvas. Quarshie references the Dutch Masters as highly influential to his artistic practice. With a veneer of ordinariness, his work gravitates toward moments of quiet, common splendour, like those expressed by Vermeer. Quarshie transposes segments of photographic images into imagined compositions that transcend factographic depictions of truth, in a style that also evokes aspects of American photorealism. Along with these, he borrows from Baroque, Neoclassical, Renaissance and Medieval styles, pastiching European painting genres from the past half-millennium. Quarshie’s work speaks through canons of pre-existing creations, which it recalls and responds to, re-presents, and also revises. The artist’s polyphony of perspectives makes it difficult to approach from any single position. Like the carnivalesque festivals and feasts before it, Quarshie’s exhibition demands not just spectatorship but participation—by the women who pose as characters; the institutions that host interventions; workers, customers and passers-by induced into interaction; or objects and architectures that receive and inscribe the work. These groups filter onto and are filtered by the project, which is seen through screens of their various lenses and skins. The work is not made by the artist alone, but through cooperative efforts with the photographer who takes the images (Nii Odzenma), fellow artists who assist on production (Enam Bosoka for sculpture casting, Kwame Asante Agyare and Nicholas Wayo for base coats of some paintings). The project attempts to position the artist, collaborators and viewers alike to become active in the construction of their realities, which are framed and refracted in varying frequencies of yellow, crimson and blue. For the opening, the exhibition is temporarily displaced from the Gallery space of 1957 to a construction site across the way, where the skeleton of Kempinski’s imminent upscale shopping mall nears completion. Paintings and pipes inhabit exposed concrete; hang from bare-beamed ducts and channels. A space on the precipice of rebirth, its halls will soon be written over by the circulation of other goods and conglomerates. Is the artist’s work complicit in these systems, or does a subtle critique lie within its participation? Quarshie’s evanescent occupation is cast as kind of shadow, or an echo, whose presence will reverberate from seams of cement, and in recollections of minds and materials that may recall its traces.

‘Eyram’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2015 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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Works Referenced Aidoo, Ama Ata (2015). “A Falling”. Kinna Reads. 13 Nov. 2015. <www.kinnareads.com/ 2015/11/13/a-falling-poem-by-ama-ata-aidoo/>,

accessed 25 Jul. 2016.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Baudrillard, Jean (1981). Simulacra and Simulations – I. The Precession of Simulacra. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1994.

Foucault, Michel (1982). “This is not a Pipe”. With illustrations by René Magritte. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nkrumah, Kwame. (25 Oct. 1963). “African Genius” [Opening of the Institute of African Studies University of Ghana, Legon].

Schama, Simon (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

seid’ou, kąrî'kạchä; George Ampratwum; Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu; Robin Riskin (2015). “Silent Ruptures: Emergent Art of the Kumasi

College of Art”. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. Vol. 5, No. 10; October 2015.

For the opening, the exhibition is temporarily displaced from the Gallery space of 1957 to a construction site across the way, where the skeleton of

Kempinski’s imminent upscale shopping mall nears completion.

Endnotes 1 The plastic jerry cans are popularly nick-named “Kufuor” gallons after

Ghana’s former President from the 2000s, during a time of water crises.

2 Silence between the Lines, a thoughtful selection of artists at the centre of an emergent wave of contemporary art in Ghana, was co-presented by blaxTARLINES KUMASI and εyε | Contemporary Art Ghana, at Prime Motors Ltd. Showroom in Ahenema Kokoben, Kumasi in 2015. blaxTARLINES is the contemporary art project space for the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST in Kumasi.

3 The Gown must go to Town… (2015) was titled after an axiom from Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Genius” speech of 1963, with the idea that it was time for the academic “gown” to flow through the “town”, but also for the “town” to flow through the “gown” and somehow transform it. The show presented end-of-year work from the Department’s graduating class of B.F.A. students, as well as special guest artists and alumni, of which Quarshie was among.

4 According to legend, the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis painted Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, by compiling segments of multiple bodies (one woman’s breasts, another’s hair, etc.) into a single ideal form. The Italian renaissance painter Vasari has also depicted Zeuxis in the act of painting, in a fresco at the Casa Vasari in Florence.

5 Surrealist artist René Magritte’s painting of 1929—titled La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images)—shows an image of a pipe captioned by the text, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). The work references a shifting relationship between objects and the images or texts that signify them, as discussed by Saussure and other Structuralist theorists.

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‘Shooter’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2015 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Christiana’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Obiribea’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Keren’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Franklina’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Stephanie’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Auntie Dedei’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Taibatu’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Efya’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Ama K.’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Evelyn’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

122 x 152cm

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‘Mabel and Akuyo’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

152 x 213cm

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‘Naa Ayorkor and Adei’, Yellow is the Colour of Water, 2016 (work in progress) Acrylic on canvas

152 x 213cm

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Village Tech, 2011 Acrylic on linen

122 x 152cm

Artist’s earlier works

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32 Muses, 2013 Acrylic on canvas

160 x 120cm

Market Woman's Daughter, 2012 Acrylic on linen

101 x 127cm

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Artist Biography

Selected Exhibitions2016 Making Africa, Centre de Cultura Yellow is the Colour of Water, Solo Show, Gallery 1957, Accra

2015 The Gown Must Go To Town…, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, National Museum of Science and Technology, Accra

Silence Between the Lines, blaxTARLINES KUMASI and Ɛyε | Contemporary Art Ghana, Prime Motors Ltd., Kumasi

2014 The Munich-project, Global Art — Local View, Villa Mohr, Munich

2013 Muses, Goethe Institut, Accra

The ‘Sabi Yu Rutu’ project, Suriname

2012 Time, Trade and Travel, Nubuke Foundation, Accra and Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), Amsterdam

The Ghana-project, Global Art — Local View, Goethe Institut, Accra

Jeremiah Quarshie’s practice takes its narrative from social concerns and contradictions in contemporary life, negotiating anxieties with parody and lightness. Deceptively realistic paintings that appropriate from classical formats blur notions of fact and fiction: simulations that upturn conventional relations of things. Quarshie studied art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, and has exhibited in shows in Ghana, Germany, the Netherlands, and Suriname. He was born in Accra, where he lives and works today. Yellow is the Colour of Water is his first solo show.

This catalogue accompanies Jeremiah Quarshie’s exhibition Yellow is the Colour of Water at Gallery 1957, curated by Robin Riskin, 19 August — 22 October 2016

A multi-site exhibition project staged across various locations in Accra: The Kempinski Hotel, Tema Station and Kotoka International Airport

Collaborating Institutions National Lottery Authority Speedmasters Ltd. Ghana Airports Company Ltd.

Production Enam Bosoka, Kwame Asante Agyare, Nicholas Wayo Photography Nii Odzenma Design Hyperkit, London Press Pelham Communications

All photographs by Nii Odzenma except page 2 image courtesy of blaxTARLINES KUMASI; pages 4, 44 and 45 by Jeremiah Quarshie; page 14 top image courtesy of Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City; and page 43 by Dennis Dartey.

All images © Jeremiah Quarshie

Catalogue © Gallery 1957 Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City PMB 66 — Ministries Gamel Abdul Nasser Avenue Ridge — Accra Ghana

www.gallery1957.com

All or part of this publication may not be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

With great thanks to support from... The women who posed for paintings: Manye Osei-Wireko, Caroline Eyram Odor, Jane Awindor, Ama K. Abebrese, Carranzer Naa Okailey Shooter, Miriam Obiribea Mantey, Franklina Osei-wusu, Mabel and Fian Akuyo Akotia, Taibatu Mohammed (with help from Kelvin Prince Boateng Jnr.), Keren Amankwah, Mama Dzidoasi I, Stephanie Osei-Abrokwah, Naa Ayorkor Laryea, Sheila Adei Mensah, Ernestina Dedei Klotei, Rebecca Asamoah, Evelyn Oliveira, and Christiana Korshiwa Fiankor.

Ted Sowah and Felicity Afriyie of Speedmasters Ltd.; the office of the National Lottery Authority (NLA); Joyce Doodoo, and Mr. Boamah of the Ghana Airports Company Ltd.

Kate Sclater of Hyperkit; and Sophie da Gama Campos, Emma Gilhooly, and Francesca Meale of Pelham Communications.

blaxTARLINES KUMASI and the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

Marwan Zakhem, Yesha Puplampu, and Sarah Calodney of Gallery 1957.

Mr. and Mrs. Quarshie, and our families and loved ones.

And finally, the workers, residents and occupants of the Kempinski Hotel, the NLA, Tema Station, Ghana Airport, and surrounding vicinities, and those who play witness and participant to the exhibition.