On Pro[ab]duction

Untitled. pro[ab]duction series, May 17.   V.O.T©

Pro[ab]duction, an exhibition which officially opened on the 26thh  May, 2017 was an enquiry into a display strategy which seeks to confront visibility in a spectacle already familiar to the prospective viewers the show sort to reach. The one week solo show probes this spectacle by exploring it with Vincent Osei Turkson’s questions with material and processes that begin by aligning material values and negating them in a manner inferred historically and often spilling into spaces poached by the material during its trans-mutative journey into a world that seeks to abduct its values in a manner that predates its imageries in the aftermath.

The form that evolves as the palm kernels remain obedient in its ‘indoctrination’ it is filled with a mimetic camouflage that gives it a morpho-elasticity charged with inherent possibilities one would find interesting to outstretch with one’s display strategies. Therefore positioning itself as the perfect tool to redefine the memories attached to the space that hosts the exchange of the imagery of its new narratives. The form of these new narratives in themselves remains important in the relevant pool of exchanges we sort to generate. Display intersects with visibility to hatch interpretations that necessitates and fuels horizons beyond mirages. 

These alien bio-forms clinging to the fencing in the middle of the high street, to many except a few people who witnessed aspects of the installation of the work, has morphed out of nowhere with codes that to these people infer and is reminiscent of a past of an utopia they long for and shared in and their experiences thereof either leaves them with a fear or love.

My interest in this piece ripples through my agenda to reinvent or recycle non-spaces. Finding space as a fabric that can be manipulated in a giving array of possibilities, the piece being transposed into the space, to many viewers, from nowhere, for its mimetic confrontations to accrue values that have been as of now only realised in glimpses of first hand feedbacks. Notwithstanding, this set of feedbacks has already crowned what can be achieved by fine tuning to the precise range of frequency of artistic currencies prescribed by the strategic positioning and siting of the evolving visual cultures birthed at this dawn by the aesthetic evolution berthed and anchored.

The resulting visual reorientations evolving midstream in our all evolving culture has long being overlooked in accessing the dynamics being experienced in and around us today. In our interactions with the many facets of space we are almost not able to deal with the factors enmeshed in our personal views about our cultural productions. Pro[ab]duction materialised in a space which over the years have been surrounded by constant cultural punctuations of the peaking influx of academic migrants, what this means is that the immediate community to experience this show has been exposed to certain cultural traits and is assumed as equipped with certain frameworks to access the semiotic enquiries pertained to the work.

Though the dynamics of geopolitics has confined us to a ‘neo-Eden’ concept of a global village, we are not very much committed to the new tendencies generated with our cultural exchanges over the years but instead, our aesthetic sentiments mostly remained informed by our distant past futures. We strongly desire aesthetic comfortability filtered through a certain utopian past than to consider the new aesthetic cultural roles that are critically informed by present neo-villagers aesthetic identities. Our attention has shifted from our global aesthetic values such that all we see in being villagers is a certain negativity whiles forgetting that we are indeed phenomenal villagers in spectacles needed to be filtered with geo-aesthetic views.

For instance from traces of memories from utopian pasts, stimuli projected from Turkson’s work has being interpreted as popular fetishist presence, the peaceful evaluation of this situation is that with a second look, this value of fetishism can be detangled from the phobias of a section of the viewers who confess to avoiding the space, because of our visual invaders, and robed it in the auras of religious reliquary as the piece also echoes the ancient tradition of counting beads for litanies, mantras and shamanic chants or even, stripping the forms bare of these animistic bases and allowing it to add to the memories already coded into the fabric of this very space. For it is in this view that we strategically opted for a certain uncontrolled viewing such that sited between highway traffics, interpretations tagged to this piece can serve us in a form that can affect memories attached to this space.

The ‘non-spaceness’ of this space was over the duration of the show emphasised by the installation of additional segments of the fencing to declare the space inaccessible. It has been against this background that we sort to experiments with among others, with the hashtag feedback approach. Thus the feedbacks carries with them traces of the piece into other spaces that the non-spaces agenda seeks to explore in its future projects.

Michal Babanawo.

July 2017