CANCELLED Workshop: the Curatorial, vis-à-vis the Pedagogical

***  Please note: this workshop has been cancelled. ***

The workshop is led by curator and critic Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology). He is in Kumasi, Ghana and a key member of the blaxTARLINES coalition whose work is compelled by the radical hope proposed by the artist-intellectual kąrî’kạchä seid’ōu to “transform art from the status of commodity to gift”. Ohene-Ayeh’s work in the fields of pedagogy, criticism, and curating stretches across teaching at the Department of Fine Art and Curatorial Practice at KNUST in Kumasi, to running the annual peer-led, schizo-pedagogical, and inoperative art school project called CritLab since 2020 as a member Exit Frame Collective in Ghana. He also co-organises Kelas Bareng - an experimental educational project managed between Gudskul, blaxTARLINES, Städelschule, and Filmkunstskolen i Kabelvåg (FiK) which featured at Documenta Fifteen (2022) under the auspices of lumbung member Gudskul. Ohene-Ayeh is recipient of the ACASA Award for Curatorial Excellence in 2021. He has co-curated Orderly Disorderly (2017) in Ghana; the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography (2019-2020); Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (A Retrospective of Agyeman Ossei ‘Dota’) (2020-2021); TRANSFER(S), Ibrahim Mahama’s solo exhibition in Germany and Ghana (2023); and the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale with Exit Frame Collective (2023-2024). He was one of the Artistic Advisors for the 59th Venice Biennale (International Art Exhibition) in 2022. 

This workshop precedes an open public conversation between Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and Tamar Garb who will speak on radical pedagogical projects departing from curatorial work. Particularly, the conversation will delve into the work of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, an experimental incubator of Contemporary Art at KNUST spearheading the resurgence of young Ghanaian Contemporary Artists on the world stage. As Tamar Garb and Ama De-Graft Aikins at UCL have suggested, KNUST is an outstanding example of progressive pedagogics in the arts whose model of critical engagement with the urban and the modern is open-ended, post-Western, and experimental. 

This event is part of the Global Engagement Fund 'Repairing historical collaborations between KNUST and UCL in the DPU’s 70th anniversary' that has been put forward in collaboration with the Bartlett's Development Planning Unit (DPU), UCL History of Art, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the Architectural Association, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Image: Presentation by Abhishek Nilamber on UNITED SCREENS: A Project by SAVVY Contemporary at Cinéma El Hilal in Bamako, Mali as part of the public program of the 12th edition of the Bamako Rencontres 2019. Photo by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh.