Samuel Kortey Baah - Feast of the Sacred Heart

What is it about the sexual reproductive part of plants seducing ‘bees and humans’ alike? What if something or someone suggested to you that before any human could symbolize a rose flower in her culture, the last common ancestor of the rose flower had been there for not less than 35 million years or so?

That human culture lags behind its present milieu by millions of years is one of the fascinating stories that the earliest fossils can tell us. The rose flower, lilies, daffodils, and passion flowers have greatly influenced modern cultures such as the 2,000-year-old Christian religion and others like it. The rose flower is beauty with thorns, like the paradox of salvation through death. It is symbolized as love, death, lust and so on. Where am I going with this?

We have here the “Feast of the Sacred Heart”, an exhibition by Samuel Baah Kortey inspired by these systems of symbolizing which bring together human, non-human and inhuman entities. The liturgy of the Sacred Heart of Christ is one. It celebrates Christ’s love for humanity through sacrifice, death and the miracle of resurrection.

– Excerpt of Curatorial text by Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson

Download the Press Release for the full Curatorial text and for more information.