A selection of Elolo Bosoka’s multifarious contemporary creations, simultaneously radical and familiar, can be seen in his solo exhibition What He Saw Sees When He Went Goes Strolling. Curated by Dr Bernard Akoi-Jackson, at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra (September 12 - October 30, 2024), the boundary-defying selection of works follows a dynamic run of visual interventions across Kumasi, Dakar, Clermont-Ferrand, Berlin, Karlsruhe, Darmstadt and Copenhagen.

The show feels as though the artist is opening up his diaries, journals and notes as an offering to the public. In Accra and Kumasi, Bosoka is known amongst his peers and within the blaxTARLINES collective as a prolific support system for the installation of exhibitions and handling of artworks. His practice employs painterly and sculptural techniques and engages spatial and digital media to create works that seem like a poetic assemblage of the chaotic beauty cut out of the ever-shifting visual, architectural and conceptual prompts within society.

Speaking on the significance of this specific moment in Bosoka’s practice, curator Dr Akoi-Jackson told STIR, “Bosoka has almost paused in his stride to show the world the various things that have been sort of populating his eyesight or his vision over a long time.” The artist captures value in the ordinary by activating his vivid imagination. His focus is usually drawn to the unconventional aesthetic appeal that, in his opinion, is embedded within the neglected but intimate, or the fragmented but scenic.

 “Bosoka’s objects, photographs and installations are not abbreviations of what happens in the world. They are parts of the world that have been put together by an eye that is observing, a mind that is critically thinking through processes and techniques and at the same time, being very careful not to become voyeuristic or extractive. One can say that he is inspired by ideas that are already out there in the public sphere,” Dr Akoi-Jackson says. STIR caught up with Elolo Bosoka to discuss the exhibition. Excerpts from the conversation below.

Kwame Aidoo: Congratulations on your solo exhibition. Is this the biggest one yet?

Elolo Bosoka: Yes, it's a big one and includes things that have come from processes and techniques I haven't tried before. I have done a few interventions, but this is way bigger. For the past five years, both locally and abroad, my practice has been broad and diverse so organising or putting together a solo is an avenue to bring together all the different aspects in one space. It’s a sort of dream come true.

Kwame: Between all the gathering of ideas, materials and elements; the conduction of experiments; the making of the works and the organisation of the exhibiting, when does the artist pause to reflect and when is the piece finalised?

Elolo: A moment like this, is one of those times when the artist pauses. In all the hustle and bustle covering approximately five years, I am bringing all the different experiments together in a space to reflect upon them. Of course, reflection has constantly been going on, but now, it is about how all these areas could initiate narratives or not. I think the reflection is also meant for the audience. Works look different when you put them up in an exhibition. And that helps you want to either expand the idea or change a few things about it or maybe eventually call it done. But I wonder when the work is ever really done.

Kwame: What media and materials do you employ to make these different experiments?

Elolo: For this particular exhibition, there are paintings, installations and things that are so indeterminate that I refer to them as ‘objects’. This is not a mere reference. It is very intentional. I am showing graphic prints that I made earlier, inspired by my movements across cities all over the world. There's a digital application that I use constantly to trace my movements. This action then results in drawings which I reproduce with lithography. Some of the oldest forms of my work in this show are a series made from plastic sacks that I've been collecting. Recently, I've been interested in onion sacks because of the way they look when interpreted as a painterly form. They possess all the transparent and flexible characteristics that can be used in a composition. There's also another series of images that I made with a lot of focus on colour, texture and [the] everyday-ness of things. The show is very much rooted in my sojourns through many different cities.

Kwame: In the everyday technology-entrenched mediations of human life, the nomadic artist becomes a vessel, channelling and zooming into making cut-out pieces out of public observations. I think you have fixed points of making also, right?

Elolo: I always ask myself, what's the definition of a studio? Is it just that place you always go out of and come back to? Or it could also be on the streets, on a bus en route to Kumasi from Accra, or a flight somewhere. In the research I am conducting for my PhD now, I am considering the studio as a decentralised site. Akoi-Jackson makes a deliberate take on this notion as the “studio-at-large”. This kind of decentralised studio is no more in a rigid space of brick-and-mortar. How do you look at the every day as an extension of the studio? So, my movements become crucial. The site I have been engaging in for quite an extended time remains the city of Kumasi. So, Kumasi is where I have virtually had all my art training. This is where I did my BFA, MFA and now a PhD in studio practice. This is also where I operate a physical studio. But in Accra, I have extended family, siblings, relatives and networks of artists and spaces for collaborations. Teflé is where I come from and I have been thinking about starting an art space there. This is where my mum helps me to gather sacks. 

Kwame:  So in motion, you would collect these sacks and when you settle you would take them through some processes? When does thinking of the properties and conditions within the materials come in?

Elolo: I think materiality is very key. Thinking through materiality, medium and the objects they become is a constant and dynamic process. The sacks are collected mostly from local marketplaces. Most of the sacks are also connected to my mother, who is a trader of locally grown farm products. I think about the kinds of relationships that she has been able to create over time. How does her work contribute to paying my school fees or bringing food home? Aside from the material and informal systems, I am also thinking about how the social spaces that people find themselves in either reproduce certain precarious conditions or somehow help [one] escape them. On the onion bags in Dakar, I saw the inscription “Dutch onions”. I always thought the Senegalese were producing their onions. At least, that is the impression I’ve always had, probably based on the fact that Ghana imports quite a huge amount of onions from Burkina Faso. Now, even this trade is apparently challenged because Burkina Faso is no more part of the Economic Community of West African States.

When I see a lot of cargo trucks on the streets with tarpaulins, I am reminded of the work of artists like Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford or Ibrahim Mahama, who use everyday materials as pigments in some of their works. But much of what appeals to me is what occurs almost naturally, the [remains] of a hawker’s stall after they have closed for the day, or the kinds of equipment that preachers in public spaces set up when evangelising to the masses. I feel that these everyday compositions are already present. My large-scale work with the canopy-like covering borrows its title from the locality in Accra called Avenor. This place is a rallying point for a lot of cargo trucks transporting items from the southern parts of the country to the northern parts.

What also becomes very interesting about the sacks is their residues of spatial and human usage. There are names and patches from the previous lives that they had before they encountered me. I consider all those experiences crucial to the material and at the same time crucial to what forms they take afterwards. Those who give me the sacks are also collaborative contributors…at the end of the day, their experiences are part of the work or the piece.

Kwame: How was it working with the curator Dr. Bernard Akoi-Jackson since it seems to have been an ongoing interaction that started before this particular exhibition?

Elolo: Definitely. We have worked collaboratively for a long time. Apart from being an artist himself, Dr Akoi-Jackson is also a KNUST lecturer and part of our blaxTARLINES community in Kumasi. There are times when he would need a hand during projects and then I would help out in terms of documenting or getting certain logistical things done. Earlier this year, I told him that I was planning a solo and I would like him to curate it. We often had constant exchanges in and out of the studio where I updated him on what was going on and then he would give his feedback. He has an eye and understands the dynamics of the arts in Ghana.

Kwame: It's not just interventions and artworks you're doing but you've been instrumental with blaxTARLINES over the years, documenting other people's works and installing other people's projects. Can you speak a bit about this experience?

Elolo: I cannot talk about my practice without talking about blaxTARLINES because it is like this umbrella that these radical practices fall under. It's a project space within the Department of Painting and Sculpture in KNUST that started as a critique of the Euro-American system of art teaching which the colonialists bequeathed us with. That kind of teaching is one that favoured so-called ‘traditional’ forms like painting or sculpture. Professor Kąrî'kạchä Seid'ou’s interventions within the curriculum of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the KNUST have contributed immensely to a host of radical and novel approaches to art making that have opened up a great deal of possibilities. Seid'ou’s Emancipatory Art Teaching Practice has been a way to open students to interest-led, independent artistic practice. In the blaxTARLINES community, there's a great communal spirit. The professors, teachers and students have that type of relationship that is fluid for collaborating on projects. Peers learn from each other and there’s the “I help you today, tomorrow, you help me” atmosphere. This spirit of sharing is very paramount.

With blaxTARLINES, I participate as an artist, but I also take part in the construction of exhibitions. I understand how to install works in ways that they speak to one another in a space. My dad is a self-taught carpenter. Growing up, we had to learn to take up opportunities or make opportunities for ourselves.

Kwame: Can you talk a bit more about your sources of inspiration?

Elolo: I think my mum inspires me a lot. When I started, she wasn't sure how her son, who is in the university, comes back home and he's collecting charcoal sacks and sending them back to school. So the inspiration has always been how to transform these everyday objects and circuits of exchange as the points of making and thinking about art. Our daily conditions and how we are connected to objects around us are also avenues of inspiration for me. How maybe the ordinary everyday person can come into the art world or can connect to the arts.