From the curator, Nana Oforiatta Ayim: "Here we are, the world in crisis, riddled in disease and war and damage, our particular narrative now expanded across the globe. This Ghana Pavilion riddled with challenges and obstacles and yet, still the need to express ourselves, our visions, to be counted, to be among. Why was it so important for us to be here? Because we have been sidelined, marginalised, and spoken for for so long? At least here we get to define ourselves and our place in the world, or at least a few of us can, those who have understood these codes of belonging, within this rarified world of expression.
Our first pavilion, Ghana Freedom, was full with how we defined ourselves in our moment of freedom, of how far we had come since, and of how much we had fallen short of, those early freedom dreams. The artists and architect, masters in their craft and expression, the advisor an eminence grise, the curation steeped in Akan ontology of dualities and layers, infused with our very own spatial vernacular. This time, three younger artists, future builders, imagining that which we have not yet quite reached, that in which we can create new languages, new mythologies, new ways of expression and of expansion across form. In these new ways of being what might we look like? What might we be?
Afroscope infusing technology with spirit and with his own likeness of expression; can we extend beyond human form into the inanimate, can we be our own ultimate creators? Na Chainkua Reindorf reappropriating male concepts of mythology for the feminine form; creating skins of transformation, of multiplicity, where before there was only one. Diego Araúja creating connections across seas, creating new languages and new beginnings, not born of trauma; but of something all together new, as yet undefined. Structures by DK Osseo Asare defying what we have come to know of as the pinnacle of starchitecture, instead of singular and rarified; modular, open source, attainable, democratic, local, sustainable. The curation of museal spaces shifting from subject/object, reimagined as continuum, expansive, inclusive, decentralised, co-created, grounded in place, ever shifting, ever experimenting.
Within this constellation of countries at the Biennale, still the disadvantage of not being established, ‘developed’ enough, not having enough funds, funds falling through, not having systems, systems breaking down; scrambling to be part of this chorus of the world; at what cost, and to what end, the constant questioning refrain, and yet here we are, having crawled our way up the precipice, incomplete, forever late, and yet still in our own time, and here; nonetheless; black stars of the world, forever shining, forever.
