“Obrunie forced me to acknowledge that I didn’t belong anyplace. The domain of the stranger is always an elusive elsewhere” - Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

I had the opportunity to write the original essay for Michael Dika’s curatorial showcase, The Medium is the Message: The African Diaspora Story last fall for its initial run at The University of Delaware. Fittingly, the show has traveled about an hour down 95 for a showcase at Grizzly Grizzly. This iteration of the show scales to the strictures of the new venue, representing four artists, down from seven. It's “a more intimate version” in Dika’s words.

The show borrows its namesake from Marshall Mcluhan's titular Medium is The Massage. Mcluhan's Massage functions as neologism, suggesting the ways in which mass media “massage” human perception. Whereas Dika’s Message becomes a point of departure; the artists communicate the unspeakable through the materiality of their work of course. Then there’s the added dimension of Ghanaian filiation. With the exception of Rita Benissan, every artist in the show has immigrated to the United States, seeking to hone their crafts at university.

Some loose insights gleaned from my studio visits with the featured artists: Elmina Castle, once a major slave port during the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and the first European structure built in Ghana still stands. Ghana is home to the world's largest electronic waste dump, Agbogbloshie, a massive arte povera installation of the global north's obsolesced Apple products. Ghana’s main export is Gold (hence the Gold Coast). I got the sense that many of the artists in the show are taking great lengths to preserve their senses of pride, home, and self whilst America demands assimilation into its racialized caste system. I don’t know what the Ghanaian immigrant experience feels like and I readily admit It’s not something I’d endeavor to understand without projecting my own Afro-American schematic over top of it.

What I do know is that while the specter of Americanization lingers, these works are willed into being by a shared vernacular of Ghanaian yearning. A yearning that ties back to a land and its history just as much as it resounds the incommunicability of Diasporic Africa; a blackness never singular, never settled, as deep and opaque as manifold oceans traveled.

Eugene Ofori Agyei

During my studio visit with Agyei he championed Ghana, a land of at least 29 languages and dozens of ethnic groups–as a nation capacious in its unity of difference. This sense of hybridity and interdependence squares heavily in his work both conceptually and materially. In Overwhelmed, strands of delicately braided yarns and fabrics travel from wall mounted ceramics to meet at a center point, spilling ominously on the floor. These strands–Indonesian fabrics exported from China, and finally purchased in the US–become stand ins for the delicate symphonics of a globalized supply chain. This sensibility even reflects in the coloration of the piece, Ghanaian yellows, blacks, and greens entangle with the good ol’ red, white and blue. I see Agyei’s work as both a literal and figurative deconstruction of the Kente Cloth. The Kente Cloth post fiber optic internet.

Rita Mawuena Benissan

With Si Hene (from the Akan: to enthrone), Rita’s archival practice takes the diasporic mantra “We Were Kings” and substantiates the claim through historical documentation of Ghanaian Chieftaincy. Si Hene is a growing digital repository of both found and user submitted photography that show the exalted and venerated class of Ghanaian nobility and the complicated legacy of colonialism. Take for example, the Asanti Umbrella; a vestige of the Dutch imperialist presence reclaimed as a signifier of Ghanaian prestige. Initially gifted by the Dutch to Asanti Chieftains for access to trade routes along the Gold Coast, the umbrellas became part and parcel of the Ghanaian regalia. As opposed to speaking truth to power, Benissan’s work evinces historicity to a power that has been under-documented.

Emmanuel Manu Opoku

Emmanuel Manu Opoku’s found object assemblages attempt to parse through art historical notions of found art and what Opoku identifies as a distinctly Ghanaian ethic of retooling and repurposing the western worlds’ junk. Opoku emphasized the idea of “placing your own autonomy on the object.” Opoku proceeds doing so in works such as Fountain, a hydra of shower pipes and ceiling fans. As if the artist is daring Modernism to collapse on itself, Duchampian readymades are juxtaposed with the techno-optimism of Giaccomo Balla’s Dynamic’s of Boccioni’s Fist. Beyond sculpture, Opoku's penchant for surrealism is on display in At Somewhere, a self-portrait of the artist taking a genital pic on the toilet. The shower pipe motif returns, along with forks, guitars, and braids where genitals ought to be. Object oriented cacophony. Get in where you fit in-or in Opoku's case, craft a way out

Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng

Borga is a term that describes a Ghanaian living abroad, particularly in the United States or Europe, and the duty they have to financially provide for their loved ones back home. During my visit with Japheth, we talked about the anxieties he felt being apart from his family in Ghana while finishing his MFA in the states. How his family would survive in his absence, and how he's coping. During the pandemic he celebrated the birth of a son who he couldn’t immediately see because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. Upon returning home, he described the acclimation period, the month or so it took to feel like he knew his family again. This notion of Ghanaian double consciousness, of leaving and re-entering one's country of origin, and a residual natal alienation illuminate Japheth's work. Take “As A Result of My Responsibilities” for example. The artist re-stages his childhood dining room. The mother and children’s table sets sit in the center of the room. The Patriarch's chair is bigger, his tableset roomier, he sits apart from the rest of the family. The work exhibits the spatial arrangement of a Ghanaian family nucleus as something spectral, in a state of transnational osmosis.

Jenson Leonard, (artist) b. Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Lives and works in New York, United States of America. Initially a poet, Jenson Leonard became interested in memes during his six-year tenure as a cook at a Belgian waffle kiosk. He found himself drawn to the immediacy and reach of instant publication on social media, the confluence of which exacerbate the arguably inherent power of the image for those who see. His early work used the canonical Twitter meme format, but developed into the more ornately parodic style that predominates in the left-leaning corners of Facebook. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute. He has completed residencies at Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NYC). His work has been featured in VICE Motherboard, Juxtapoz, AQNB, and Rhizome.

Jenson Leonard on The Medium is the Message: The African Diaspora Story curated by Michael dela Dika