Akɛ yaaa heko || One does not take it anywhere, a collaboration with Elisabeth Efua Sutherland and Paa Joe

 

Elisabeth Efua Sutherl and Ric Bower collaborated   to weave the fabric of contemporary Accra into the traditional narratives and myths Sutherland seeks to embody in her practice, through the creation of a series of performative images.

Over a period of three days, a team consisting of Sutherland, Bower, performers and assistants, visited a variety of locations including: a commercial building plot; a derelict outdoor leisure facility and the vibrant Jamestown Fishing Village. Sutherland and the performers made a series of intuitively generated gestures before the camera, in which they responded to each other, to the coffins of Paa Joe and to the drawn chalk line that physically contained their performances.

Some traditional Ghanaian beliefs suppose the existence of a transient space that exists between life and death. Sutherland and  were particularly interested in exploring how this fluid liminality, which is so pregnant with implication for the living, might be expressed.

 

 

gallery1957.com/artists/elisabeth-efua-sutherland

 

 

 

from series: Akɛ yaaa heko || One does not take it anywhere, Elisabeth Efua Sutherland, Paa Joe and Ric Bower, 2018; pigment print, dimensions variable, featuring Alina Maria Veeser; Jacqueline Fadel; Vivian Boateng, James Turksona-Brown; Jeremiah Atcheah; Doris Mamley Djangmah; courtesy of tahe artists and Gallery 1957, Accra