BACKWARDS NEVER
Backwards Never is packed with dialogue, exploring memory, cultural identity and the various points of intersection
between past and present. The project’s lightly ironic title borrows from the famous phrase coined by Dr.Kwame
Nkrumah, the man who led my homeland Ghana to independence. This project came to be as a reaction to the nostalgia
I felt while looking through family albums from when my family still lived in Ghana. My recollection of this time period
is hazy at best.
As first generation diaspora, part of my cultural identity exists as the conglomeration of the Ghanaian influence and values of my parents and immediate family with my first hand experiences of ‘British’ culture. According to Stuart Hall, it doesn’t make me any less Ghanaian if I have spent most of my life in another country and most of my current memories are from living in Britain, “there is no one-size-fits-all cultural identity for all diasporic people” and my cultural identity is a matter of what I am 'becoming' as well as of who/what I am. My recollections of life in Ghana are formed mostly from stories told to me by my parents and sisters but “memory doesn’t arise solely from direct experience but also through the intercourse of many minds” (Oliver Sacks). Backwards Never is the manifestation of this form of memory recall, by creating new family memories I am reinterpreting and verifying the relevance of mine and my family’s past to my current reality. An outward expression of African Pride.
These images edit history and contextualise it in a manner that helps me to make more sense of it in the world I live in. By using photography, a tool which, according to Roland Barthes, is “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time”, I created a series of beautiful imperfections that are false on both counts of perception and time but verified by the nostalgia they carry and succeeded in creating another form of “temporal hallucination”.
(FEATURED IN NIIJOURNAL III: FAMILY TIES , COLOURS & CREEDS 4 (EXHIBITION) & FORME JOURNAL
SHORTLISTED FOR NEW CONTEMPORARIES 2022)
This is the Africa that is alive and well in the diaspora.