EVENT LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

This year’s FACING TIME line-up by VIENNA ART WEEK is all about time. Inspiring international guests from the fields of art, business and science will shed light on the topic from different perspectives, and a top-class panel discussion will focus on “20 editions of VIENNA ART WEEK, 20 years of Vienna as a city of art”. This will be followed by a short presentation of the anniversary publication and an aperitif.

4:10-4:40 „FROM FACING THE MIRROR TO INTENTIONAL CONVERSATIONS TO FACING TIME“

The last two decades have engendered significant transformative shifts in the art worlds of Ghana. They have been regional in composition, global in recognition, distinctive in ideology. How do we situate the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) – Ghana within these paradigms? In this presentation, I attempt to offer a description of the FCA’s fluid modus operandi, which is based on collaboration with its artist-members and partnerships with local and international organisations. The approach is to follow a titular thread, adding to what Bernard Akoi-Jackson emphasises in their article entitled ‘From Facing the Mirror to Intentional Conversations’. It chronicles the FCA’s inaugural seminar, its physical location within the city of Accra, and its institution-making in the last 20 years.

For the FCA-Ghana, facing time means continuing to ask critical how-abouts and what-ifs; it means navigating new physical territories and developing self-propagating streams of “abundance”; it means complementing and/or extending pedagogical offerings to younger generations and archiving those of older generations.

Bio:

Presently finding liminal grounds between artistic practice and the curatorial, Abbey IT-A is interested in the proverbial discursiveness inherent in Contemporary Art and how it holds in praxis. They explore this concern through experimental, multi-vocal, curatorial interventions with photography, video, text, and conversation as likely points of departure in an independent art practice. As a curator at FCA-Ghana, they help support contemporary Ghanaian art practices and discourses through research, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, interventions, and labs.

Educated in Ghana, they earned their BFA from the KNUST Department of Painting and Sculpture (2019), where they are currently a candidate for an MFA. Abbey is a recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award (2023) and is a Zeitz MOCAA & the UWC Museum Fellow (2024).