Juxtapoz Magazine – The Storytellers @ Gallery 1957, London

Gallery 1957 is happy to present The Storytellers a group show featuring new operates by: Annan Affotey, Patrick Alston, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Tiffanie Delune, Godfried Donkor, Salah Elmur, Gustavo Nazareno, Joshua Oheneba-Takyi, Yaw Owusu, Lauren Pearce, Afia Prempeh, Arthur Timothy, and Nadia Waheed. The show runs at Gallery 1957 London from the 26th May well – 9th July 2022.

The art of storytelling operates deep in any culture. Even in advance of the published word, the oral tradition of telling tales and experiences to one’s neighborhood was a way to construct solidarity among a supplied people, offer you direction and inspiration. It was an intrinsic aspect of classic life. Making use of gestures and impersonations, a grasp storyteller would expose to the viewers very important factors of historical past, day-to-day everyday living and recent occasions, celebrating heroism, failures, enjoy and victories – all with the facet of educating and commemorating important moments from a society’s shared background. It was a way to maintain one’s background, collective and personalized identity.

Who are the storytellers nowadays and how do they convey to their tales? The performs in the group show The Storytellers, which characteristics new do the job by 13 artists functioning throughout the world, display how today’s storytellers are also artists. They inform tales via visible depictions in each summary and practical kind, relaying to the viewers not only a private or collective tale in time, but the psychological practical experience undergone through that minute. The tales that are portrayed here are those that the artist tells their family members, mates and general public and the encounters preserved through their art conjure up recollections of fears, yearnings, pleasure and loss. The artist storytellers whose work is introduced in this exhibition depict a want and want to doc and maintain on to present-day everyday living in flux, in the course of a time of excellent improve. 

Their poignant portrayals, the vast majority of which are carried out on canvas with a couple of in multimedia, tell tales of profound individual and collective reflection through real looking depictions akin to images them selves, though in some others by way of abstract and expressionistic portrayals that provide to showcase heightened psychological states encompassing a particular function or individual. In some circumstances, like in the work of Sudanese Salah Elmur, known for his endearing painted depictions of figures usually from his childhood, storytelling is about remembering own and general public anecdotes about individual times in time. In the meantime, diaspora artists such as Patrick Alston, operating in the United States reveals his tales through edgy summary canvases and that of Brazilian Gustavo Nazareno is influenced by Afro-Brazilian religions that continue to be practiced these days and Tiffanie Delune’s transfixing summary canvases that project her particular trauma and childhood experiences as if making an attempt to mend, find out and train some thing in the system of telling these tales. In Lauren Pearce’s big multi-media will work and outside murals, created in vivid colors and which render at occasions portraits and other situations abstracted subjects check out her identity and group. And lastly, Nadia Waheed’s function examines storytelling in a worldwide and multicultural dialogue – a lot agent of the artist herself who was born to Pakistani moms and dads in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia and lived and practiced in France, Egypt, Pakistan and now the US. Waheed now uses her global exposure to lay bare the intricacies of her female identity by massive-scale allegorical figurative paintings, telling tales as an agency to hook up with herself and the broader planet. 

The artists presented in the exhibition The Storytellers do particularly this. The breadth of artistry on exhibit in this group display testifies to the lots of contemporary artists now operating out of Ghana in a selection of types and mediums. From Afia Prempeh’s haunting real looking portrayals of Ghanaian females with their heightened attention to element to Annan Affotey’s piercing portraits of Ghana’s guys and women Serge Attukwei Clottey’s poignant summary expressionist paintings with their highly effective figures Yaw Owusu’s putting and scintillating mixed-media ensembles that seem to demarcate Ghana’s social and political systems Godfried Donkor’s meticulously rendered figures that analyze the socio-historical interactions involving West Africa and Europe Arthur Timothy, whose sensible canvases relay personal and collective recollections encompassing critical functions using place all-around the time of Ghana’s independence and Joshua Oheneba-Takyi, a younger Ghanaian painter whose storytelling can be found in the way he merges abstract and realism – leaving the narration of each and every canvas inside the subjective realm and open to the spectator’s possess concepts of what tales he is trying to convey to.  

The artists in this display doc via their is effective the colourful mosaic of their individual various present-day society and earlier histories, resurrecting the every day person and his and her stories to a regional and worldwide audience.