Ghanaian curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim on why the future of the museum must exist beyond art’s traditional boundaries:
In Venice as well—we’ve connected with people from the local community who are looking at themes that reflect or resonate with those of the Ghana pavilion, to do a Mobile Museum outside of the biennale later in the year., our national dish. So like music and food, the idea of the structure is something that everybody has access to—because they’re open source; they’re modular; anyone can put them together.
In the 1960s, [then-president] Kwame Nkrumah commissioned these Italian architects to build a national museum in Accra. And then obviously we had the coup, and he was deposed, and the museum, as it was envisaged, never came to be. You know, I was asked to be the lead curator, and I initially had this whole plan of creating a kind of decolonial institution. And then the minister of tourism comes and says, “Well, actually, you only have a week to finish the exhibition.” A week!Because it was on his political agenda. And so this whole deeply thought-through narrative got sidelined by politics.
When you go to the opening of the Venice Biennale or the Dakar Biennale, or even in an exhibition in Accra, what you find is other people who know and appreciate the arts already—other artists or curators or thinkers or academics or art lovers. Which is fine and great; it’s a family, and I’m not knocking it at all.
That’s kind of the future for Ano. We have a bit of land up in the mountains, in Aburi, and we’re creating a farm and school.