Nana Oforiatta Ayim. Photo: Fifi Abban.
A dozen years ago, Nana Oforiatta Ayim worked in the Africa department at the British Museum. Since then, the Ghanaian art historian, filmmaker, and writer has been deconstructing the very idea of it—or rather, the very colonial idea of a museum as a monolithic institution that at once “elevates the art object and distances you from it,” she said, devoid of local context.
Oforiatta Ayim is behind Accra’s nonprofit Ano Institute of Arts and Knowledge and its Pan-African Cultural Encyclopedia, a digital archive-in-progress of all things culture-related across the continent’s 54 countries. In 2016, with the architect DK Osseo-Asare, she created a Mobile Museum to travel around the country—not only exhibiting its collections, but also inviting local communities to contribute to them en route.
Now, the Mobile Museum is gearing up to travel around Venice, Italy, where Oforiatta Ayim returned to curate the Biennale’s Ghana Pavilion for a second time, having launched it with the architect David Adjaye in 2019 to much acclaim. While the inaugural pavilion situated Ghana’s present in relation to its past, this year’s exhibition—“Black Star: The Museum as Freedom,” with large-scale installations by emerging artists Na Chainkua Reindorf, Isaac Nana Akwasi Opoku (a.k.a. Afroscope), and Diego Araúja exploring new modes of expression—is more focused on the future.
Cheers,
Errol
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