Art is a Process

There are those artists that conceive a project, do it in the hours, weeks or months it might need, and are then done with it. And then there are the ones whose art grows with them, sometimes over decades as they go back and alter things, add and fine-tune, their art an intimate reflection of their life and the journey they make through it. A very fine example of this is Senam Okudzeto, currently teaching the course "Conceptual Drawing" at fortress Hohensalzburg, who yesterday took the time to introduce us to her art.

Be it projects like the orange stands she initially discovered on a trip to Ghana, or the search for a new currency, she always starts from a very personal point, playing with her mixed heritage, looking for an identity. Sometimes she does so without even being aware of it at first, like in a series of works that combine childhood photos with bags universally associated with refugees and immigrants. The artist spent her childhood in Nigeria until at age 10 she was forced to leave the country with her little brother, leaving her arrested father behind. He later resurfaced, but "This episode was to be forgotten, not to be talked about. So I started working with the photos im my late 20ies and didn't even know what I was doing until a nigerian photograph visited my studio and filled me in on what had actually happened back then."says the artist.

The artist also started an NGO in Ghana called Art in Social Structures, or AISS (www.artinsocialstructures.org). This stemmed from wanting to do something with the revenue from her orange stands that had initially come from ghanan women, and the realisation that art was limited to the elites in Ghana, which she wanted to remedy. Thus AISS was born.

Mrs. Okudzeto will be speaking in depth about the organisation on the second day of the Global Art panel that will be held on the 29th and 30th of July. mp