Bernard Akoi-Jackson
Photo Credit Natascha Libbert
Bernard Akoi-Jackson (PhD), is a Ghanaian artist, writer, curator and educator who lives and works from Tema/Accra/Kumasi. He interrogates hybrid post-colonial identities, through ephemeral make-shift memorials and performative rituals of the mundane. His interests cut across forms and media. Using critical absurdity, he becomes the proverbial jester or Eṣu moving between genres. His multi-disciplinary, audience implicating installations and performative “pseudo-rituals”, have featured in exhibitions like An Age of Our Own Making (Reflection II), Roskilde Denmark, (2016); Silence Between The Lines, Kumasi, Ghana (2015), Material Effects, East Lansing, USA (2015), WATA don PASS: Looking West, Lagos and Malmö, Sweden (2015) and Time, Trade and Travel, Amsterdam and Accra, Ghana (2012 and 2013). He has co-curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES, most prominent being The GOWN must go to TOWN (2015), Cornfields in Accra, (2016) and Orderly Disorderly, (2017). Akoi-Jackson holds a PhD in Painting and Sculpture from the College of Art and Built Environment, (KNUST), Kumasi, where he also lectures with particular interest in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art practice.
He is drawn to the politics of such vestiges of colonialist encounter as the overtly bureaucratic rituals that lead to absurdist stalemate in society. By means of paintings, performances, videos, murals, installations and texts, he creates immersive, absurdist interventions and situations that are both atmospherically dense, yet permeable to critical audience reactions. Within his works a plurality of the senses are engage, initiating processes of action, reflection with a penchant for the disruptive. He curated the inaugural exhibition: “Galle Winston Kofi Dawson: In Pursuit of something ‘Beautiful’, perhaps...” at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Tamale, Ghana. He co-curated the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Akoi-Jackson is a member of the Ghanaian Artist Collective Exit Frame. He also leads the performative lab, eX-para-Mental.