Keeping Time
Curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn
26th October 2024 – 11th January 2025
Gallery 1957
Third Floor, Galleria Mall
Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast and Galleria Mall
PM 66 – Ministries
Gamel Abdul Nasser Avenue
Ridge – Accra
Ghana
Gallery 1957 proudly presents Keeping Time, curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn. The exhibition opens on the 26th of October in Accra. Keeping Time is a group exhibition that significantly brings together both international and Ghana-based artists from the African diaspora, exploring notions of Blackness, being, and time.
By presenting artworks that are both dream-like and speculative, abstract and figurative, the exhibition questions and disrupts our sense of being in the world through African diasporic perceptions of time.
Keeping Time is presented as a sequel to Gallery 1957’s monumental 2023 group show, In and Out of Time, curated by Ghanaian-British writer and curator Ekow Eshun. The exhibition is a highlight of Accra Cultural Week, taking place from the 24th to the 28th of October 2024—a series of interconnected, intimate, and public events encouraging deeper engagement with Ghana’s vibrant contemporary art scene, spearheaded by Gallery 1957.
Image courtesy of Gallery 1957
The show introduces artists who are exhibiting with Gallery 1957 for the first time, such as Okiki Akinfe, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Alvaro Barrington, Winston Branch, Kenwyn Crichlow, Kimathi Donkor, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lyle Ashton Harris, Andrew Pierre Hart, Che Lovelace, Sola Olulode, Sikelela Owen, Ravelle Pillay, Elias Sime, Lina Iris Viktor, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. It also features returning artists such as Gideon Appah, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Amoako Boafo, Phoebe Boswell, Godfried Donkor, Modupeola Fadugba, Julianknxx, Arthur Timothy, and Alberta Whittle.
Perhaps it can be said of all artworks that they affect our perception of time. But in the case of an exhibition of Black artists taking place in Africa, context becomes a significant factor. This exhibition proceeds from an awareness that the experience of time is often a reflection of power relations between societies.
In the Western imagination, people of African descent have historically been seen as the antithesis of Western modernity—considered savage where the West is civilized, ignorant instead of rational, and underdeveloped rather than advanced. Under colonialism, the human-centered perceptions of time that were commonplace in Africa before European presence were subsumed within Western structures of industrial time and order. Indeed, the subjugation of indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems was taken as a prerequisite for advancement into the future.
Against this backdrop of chronopolitics and colonial imposition, Keeping Time explores how the work of artists invites looser and more lyrical readings of time. Conceived as a follow-up to In and Out of Time, the 2023 Gallery 1957 exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun, which was founded on a similar skepticism towards linear notions of progress and modernity, Keeping Time presents works that invoke African diasporic perceptions of time as the inspiration for expansive dreaming and possibility.
Photo Credit Zeinab Batchelor
These works are conjured on the basis of what the scholar Geneva Smitherman defines as “African People’s Time”: Being in tune with human events, nature, seasons, natural rhythms, not a slave to the artificial time of the man-made clock. Being ‘in time,’ in tune with… the general flow of things [not] being ‘on time’.
To “keep time” in music is to synchronize the work of the individual with the ensemble, all the players tied together by the same rhythm, the same tempo, the same sense of attunement. In the context of this exhibition, keeping time is imagined as a collective act of reaching beyond Western binaries of progress and underdevelopment.
To that end, the exhibition weaves together a lattice of conceptual and aesthetic considerations about the experience of time, spanning intergenerational, geographic, and historical contexts. It gathers works that range from abstraction to figuration, created by a multigenerational span of artists. Senior figures such as Winston Branch and Kenwyn Crichlow, born in the 1940s and 1950s, share the space with younger artists like Sola Olulode, Rita Mawuena Benissan, and Okiki Akinfe, born in the 1990s.
The exhibition also showcases paintings by Caribbean-born artists such as Branch, Crichlow, Che Lovelace, and Alberta Whittle in West Africa for the first time, placing them in dialogue with the work of British and Ghanaian-born artists in a shared exploration of Black diasporic cultural identity as “a state of being and a process of becoming, a condition and consciousness located in the shifting interstices of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ a voyage of negotiation between multiple spatial and social identities” (Paul Tiyambe Zeleza).
Image courtesy of Gallery 1957
Additionally, artists such as Godfried Donkor, Arthur Timothy, and Kimathi Donkor explore the absence or marginalization of the Black figure in Western art history, revisiting the past to offer a reframing of presence and memory that situates Black people at the subjective center, rather than the periphery, of historical narratives. The result is a collection of individual works moving in rhythm and attunement to assert the richness and complexity of Black being and Black movement through the world.
Keeping Time: Curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn opens on the 26th of October 2024 until the 11th of January 2025 at Gallery 1957, Ridge – Accra, Ghana
©2024 Gallery 1957
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