Hassan Issah: Kum Ase - A Field Filled with Golden Spikes

“I think we have to inspire design to be more than utilitarian, to be more than functional. We need to inspire useless design. Just for the sheer effort of inventing and creating things as a way of innovating.” – Okwui Enwezor

The garden-fields can be seen in garments, clothing, architecture, painting and everywhere we turn. Hassan Issah leaves no room in making his works appear familiar and yet, unfamiliar. He complicates forms: painting on frames, applique on door-like furniture, constructing paintings, welding drawings, photography collaged on wrought iron ornamentations, and turning the head of classical furniture baluster, by giving it a fork head with lily-pike finials from fences.

Kumasi inspires such crazy forms. There are very interesting and humorous forms that emerge from Kumasi; like putting a Versace-Medusa head on a gate with Adinkra symbols, playing with colourful Alucobond on buildings with Greco-Ionic columns, plastering of gold everywhere with baroque designs to show-off opulence, and church posters overlapping with penis enlargement posters. These examples point out how contradictory spaces already merge around us, histories from different timelines cross, spaces geographically miles apart collide, and forms keep erupting in ways we do not always imagine or expect as they keep evolving.

It is these interesting elements that Hassan Issah chances upon in his studies of the cityscape, that smuggles its way into his work; from colour combinations of wearing-out paint walls, rusted metal fabrications, adinkra symbols, Islamic ornamentation, clustered posters, use of vegetable oils with water-based acrylic, and so on. This also leads him to learning from local artisans like welders and carpenters who also shape the architectural and social landscape of Ghana.

Kumasi, like its sister cities in Ghana, has its own unique contribution to modernity especially during the early independence of the 1950s and 60s, which experimented with combinations of tradition and modernity.

– Excerpt of Curatorial text by Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson

Download the Press Release for the full Curatorial text.