Ghana Must Go 0.1
Ablode – Future Vitality 2017
Àshe: Spirit of Flow
January 2017 – September 2017
Untitled 2015
Isaac Opoku
Digital Drawing
Nubuke Foundation is pleased to announce Isaac Opoku as the winner for the first call of Ghana Must Go programme (Ablode- Future Vitality).
During the next 9 months until September 2017, Isaac will be bringing his innovative ideas to fruition. Isaac’s idea was chosen because it demonstrates a consciousness of Ghana in the context of the world today, whilst recognising the challenges of democratising the distribution of resources. We hope to keep you engaged during his creative process.
In the past year Nubuke Foundation celebrated 10 years of existence in the arts and cultural milieu of Ghana. In these years the Foundation has come to be recognized as one of the biggest supporters of the visual arts and culture of Ghana. Looking into the years ahead, the pertinent question of, what the role of the art[s] and the artist to the society constantly lingers on.
As such, we seek to use art to [re]imagine, envision and define the future – to create new futures for Ghana, straddling different realities and to propose critical redefinitions for all things.
‘Ghana Must Go’ will be the springboard on which this exploration will take place.
Envisaged to be implemented over a 3 year period through open calls, ‘Ghana Must Go’offers resources including professional mentoring and funding support to the selected artist[s] to develop and execute a project over a 10 month period.
The process of the project will be shared over our social media platforms.
About the Artist
Isaac Opoku is an interactive designer and mixed media artist, whose work is primarily inspired by the deep sense of interconnectedness he feels with all life. This feeling moves him to explore and experiment with wide-ranging themes and mediums, in ways that echo the intimacy he feels with all that is.
Having come to this felt realization of oneness, he makes art that critiques who he once was and what he once believed. This critique of his own life through art is often cloaked in the abstract and psychedelic twists he employs within his work. He does this to engender a sense of wonder in viewers’ minds, so that they also come to question their own realities, and subsequently challenge certain conventional perspectives.
Though his subject matter tends to explore various relevant social themes such as politics, oppression, race and gender, it is also usually evocative of art as a form of experimentation, art as a form of meditation and art simply as being.
Artist’s Project Concept
‘‘Oneness’ fascinates me. For me it’s progressed beyond a mere concept to an actual feeling.A feeling that everything is connected more deeply than we choose to acknowledge. That I am the words on the screen I see now, that they are not separate from me. That I am you and you are me. That everything is one, beyond the metaphysical.
As an artist, I’ve attempted to express this idea visually in various ways. I’ve borrowed concepts from Keith Haring, Saki Mafundikwa, Alan Watts and others to this end. Most prominently I’ve visually reimagined the Yoruba concept of Àshe – the spiritual life energy that underpins all existence – in a way that I believe speaks directly to this felt sense of Oneness. The style draws from the essence of Afrikan alphabets and symbology, to create a dynamic nexus of line movements, which come together, come apart and remerge to create complete artworks.
Using this Àshe inspired drawing style, I’ve transformed my Instagram page into an ever evolving singular piece of art, which connects the squares of the Instagram grid into one cohesive and constantly growing artwork. To experience the whole piece, viewers have to interact with the work by scrolling and also tapping and zooming, to have a more granular perspective of the individual sections that make the whole.
As an interactive designer and techie, I fell in love with this idea. I loved the idea of leveraging the intimacy we share with mobile technology and the importance of social media platforms in our lives, to create an evolving interactive artwork which not only espouses Oneness, but also draws directly from my West African roots.
The next step now is to translate this online virtual artwork into a physical interactive art experience. Ablode – Future Vitality, provides the platform to do just that. The idea is to create a larger piece of art which responds to a viewer’s presence by scrolling on its own, unlike the original mobile work where viewer’s have to scroll to experience it. When the viewer leaves, the art remains in stasis. It’s an ambitious project that will bring together art, coding and engineering, but it is one that I believe Ghana must go towards.’’
Project Initiated by Nubuke Foundation and Supported by Arts Collaboratory
About Nubuke Foundation
The Nubuke Foundation is a non-governmental institution founded in 2006 to promote the visual arts, culture and heritage of Ghana.
About Arts Collaboratory
Arts Collaboratory is a platform for transnational exchange and cooperation made up of over 20 arts organizations from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The mission of Arts Collaboratory is to promote collaborative, inventive, and open visual arts practices that are socially engaging and transformative.
For inquiries, please contact:
Further information can be found at:
www.nubukefoundation.org
info@nubukefoundation.org
https://www.facebook.com/nubukefoundation
https://twitter.com/InfoNubuke