Press Release by The Mistake Room
TMR is pleased to present Serge Attukwei Clottey: Solo Chorus, the Ghanaian artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Clottey's work highlights the dense network of relationships—personal and bodily, political, economic, and ecological—that index themselves through his primary source material, the plastic Kufuor Gallon used by families throughout Ghana for their daily water supply. Solo Chorus focuses on the activation of this network - the interplay between collectivism and individuality in Clottey’s practice, which nimbly operates across the intersections of social activism and abstract formalism. The installation interweaves his sculptural wall works, many of them newly created for this exhibition, with free-standing three-dimensional objects in wood and bronze, works on paper, video, and performance to map the issues of land ownership, dynamics of gender, and environmental awareness in Ghana. Through inventive solutions of shape, texture, composition and narrative across these diverse disciplines, a distinct vocabulary emerges, mixing singular and plural to pose questions of the interrelationship of political agency and artistic authorship. What are the kinships and tensions between social and aesthetic change? Over the passage of time, be it the life of a person, nation, or culture, does any of these limits truly exist, or is it more accurate to speak of cycles, variations, and iterations on themes of hardship and hope?