2019
Solo Exhibition resulting from wining the Vontobel award for young contemporary photography .
and Maore) in two separate visits to experience the island region which I first heard about through the Aljazeera documentary “Island of Death”. Surprisingly this place is hardly ever visible even on geographic maps. One event that brought the Comoros into the
world’s attention was the crash landing of hijacked Ethiopian airline flight 961 in its waters. It made headlines because it was the most fatal airplane hijacking incident prior to the 9/11 attacks. To
make the fatal event even worse for the obscured island, the need to preserve 115 bodies from 15 different countries meant that the only coldroom on the island had to be converted into a temporal
morgue. This meant the collapse of the SOCOVIA cold-room after it housed the corpses. It also affected the major source of economic activities for the youthful islanders.
I staged this performative photographic series in that now-defunct coldroom. Furthermore, I filmed the ocean from where the crash occurred and superimposed transcripts of conversations between the hijackers and the pilot onto the video. Together with a downloaded news reportage of the crash captured by a tourist on the beach, I installed both videos on four decommissioned economy class airplane seats.
The project produces its own fictions based on these encounters with such events, places, people, language, narratives, and so on. At the same time it escapes the dependency on such encounters for its meaning by allowing the play of multiple image forms to become the fulcrum of engagement.
“Our present theme « to dream, to imagine » brings the concept of ‘virtual time’ to my mind. And the image that goes with it is artist Kelvin Haizel’s « Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom » (2018) photography series. For me the image, with all its paradoxes, impossibilities and contradictions, speaks to the radically new laws of visuality, of perception, and of cognition by which our digital paradigm sets for us. Truth is vital and necessary. But the experience of the world today, especially in terms of images, renders the classical truth-false binary inadequate. The digital image (whether pictorial, sound, gestural, or in any other codified form) connects us to infinite dimensions in terms of time and space. Therefore to dream or to imagine in a world such as this could be a very powerful and emancipatory gesture.”
Text by curator and writer Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh as part of his virtual project in collaboration with LABO148 titled New Cartographies: Letters from the “Whole World” (2020-2021) on the theme ‘to dream, to imagine’