If we’re happy in our dreams, does that count?

Steloolive presents a sound installation as an invitation to a dream; a pensive dialogue and a performance. Titled “Story Clouds”, the installation is inspired by the prospect of a fictional Accra that is hyperresponsive to its waterscapes. Steloolive attempts to reconcile that dream to the city’s waking soundscapes, burgeoning landscapes and architectural forms. The installation invites  its audience to take off their shoes and make their way across water to take a seat. Audience members are encouraged to wear a sleep mask and relax while listening to a recorded sound that activates a dreamscape in their mind, connecting with a city’s memory. Here, the mind constructs its own healing fictional dream.

The work also extends into the city of Stuttgart through performance pieces in its public spaces, offering the two cities a portal through which they may connect.

“See the World as Your Own Image” is a collaborative installation of works by Fatric Bewong and Nii Noi Nortey. Through a spatial experiment considered by the artists as “the fictional sacred world of children,” and a sound installation that activates the built space, audience members are invited into a chamber-world with multiple exits. 

In this world, the walls are soft and covered in scribbles drawn by children between two and seven years-old, in Accra and Stuttgart. Here, the scribbles are rid of all derogatory connotations of meaninglessness, and elevated to a hallowed status like their ancient counterparts. The drawings are complemented by a soundscape of animals–recorded or imitated–and experimental music that combines Nortey’s inventive adaptations of wind and string instruments. These include Afrifons, Ngoni, and bass harps with plastic water bottles and hose pipes or straws that pour down from above.

“Rumours Untitled” is a two-part installation of works by Eric Gyamfi. The first part is presented in the form of a 3.60m long Pantone Classic Blue table. Installed within this table are 40 photographic glass plates developed using a combination of pigment extracted from teak trees in Accra and different plant pigments sourced in Stuttgart. The glass plates sprout from the table’s surface like neatly arranged trees.

Also incorporated in the table is a single-channel film that documents the chemical convergencies that produced the plates. The table works in a way that the audience can experience the photographic plates and film from several viewing points, subject to the spatial conditions inside the gallery. 

The second part of the installation is a digital print installed near the table, developed from a photographed portion of one of the plates. Because of the frosted surface of the glass, the image it produces once photographed and scaled up appears to be pixelated, paralleling digitally produced images despite having been produced by analogue chemical processes. The two parts together form a hybrid map of distant imaginary lands (for human perception), and that of chemical compounds (for microorganisms). 

Interested in alternative photographic processes, Gyamfi has experimented with cyanotypes in the open air where objects, insects, and leaves would occasionally fall on the sheets, leaving a print; and later with anthotypes, another early photographic process that utilizes plants and flower pigments. He continues to experiment with these processes and develops the photographic glass plates that are literal documentations of the landscape, made in collaboration with the very subject.

“The City as a Canvas” transforms excerpts from a printed non-fiction document of legible text, based on the artist’s research consisting of interviews, observations and personal experiences. These emerge as something that becomes illegible and contains no semantic meaning, thus complicating the binaries of fact and fiction. The work compromises cotton and paper sheets on which illegible text is sewn using thread. Readers and viewers are encouraged to move around the sheets, experiencing the works in isolation or in connection to each other, as well as to the other works in the exhibition.

As a collection of pages of text hung on twine, the work nods towards the undoing of the book, allowing for individual and communal reading. With added elements of movement from the inclusion of fans and light play with coloured spotlights, the work encourages a bodily reading as well as a visual one, such that the reading of the “book” becomes a dance. The added sound component in this work further transports the work from a visual to an audio-visual story.

“GLITCH: It’s 2022, You are [back] in a Womb” is a speculative installation that reimagines life in the womb, and is a part of Nyahan’s larger body of work titled “Existential Bodies”. The project is a multimedia presentation of the artist’s preoccupation with objects and beings that trigger thoughts on the past, present and future of our bodies. What does it mean that we exist? What does it mean to exist in relation to these objects? She uses the womb as a point of departure into the unknown, encouraging viewers to playfully contemplate or negotiate their own realities. 

The thought of having inhabited a womb yet having no recollection of your stay is disconcerting. It is a universal experience–yet paradoxically, none of us can share our perspectives on that. In this piece, Nyahan presents a humorous take on what life in the womb is like. What does the environment feel like? What sounds might have been heard?

She constructs this semi-fictional environment by experimenting with audio, visuals and tactile senses. “GLITCH” comes together by fusing recorded sounds from wombs and voiceovers, projecting them from textile figures in space, juxtaposing animations of pregnancy ultrasounds and distorted images, and lastly sculptural objects made of found materials and textiles that invite you to touch.

Nyahan ponders many questions throughout the piece: does trauma begin in the womb? Why does the thought of being here feel so disconnected sometimes? “When I look at objects of birth, I have a heavy feeling that is questioning my existence. It might be the feeling of death. I’m not sure, but I invite everyone to engage in that feeling, explore it, go crazy with it and have fun with it”.