Swapping dukes for bus drivers with his multimedia takes on Ghanaian working-class life, Caleb Kwarteng Prah is the painter and photographer putting an Afrocentric spin on art history.
Caleb Kwarteng Prah brings photography and painting together in works inspired by everyday Ghanaian life. For Prah, the past provides a rich field for rethinking image-making in the present, particularly by paying attention to the conditions and forces which have shaped the understanding of Black African life and its representations.
The Ghanaian artist’s practice is inspired by storytelling, and his pro- cess involves close dialogue with his community to inform the stories that he tells. Prah also gives visibility to those who have been overlooked: in his 2017 series, Dukes of Trotro, he appropriates a work by Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, which portrayed the Duke of Urbino and his wife in side profile staring at each other. Prah recasts the couple as trotro (Ghanaian minibus) drivers adopting the same pose, printing their portraits on film mounted on plywood and then cutting them to fit the windowpane of actual trotro bus doors or car boot windows. In this body of work blending photography, painting and found objects, Prah creates a hybrid and distinct language of representation.
By transforming discarded car parts into a contemporary frame for his images, Prah’s work probes at the history of how frames’ decorative styles signalled what was popular at the time, telling stories about when and where the artwork was completed. In his most recent series, this year’s Portraits of a City. One Minute Instant, he draws inspiration from personal archives and family albums to think about the representation of Ghanaians from independence onwards.
Here, Prah discusses the importance of African self-representation, and how the histories of painting and photography collide in his approach to contemporary image-making.
CREDITS :
Text by JAREH DAS
@bior_elliott @kaci0n @calebprah1 @_paakofi__
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