Le Temps de la parole, around the exhibition (cancelled)

On Saturday, October 24, a day of talks will bring the artists of The Harvest Season into dialogue with thinkers, researchers, architects, and artists. Drawing from the works in the exhibition and the history of the Parliament of Ghosts, this program aims to explore key themes of the project through cross-disciplinary exchanges. 

• 11:30am: Keynote by Ibrahim Mahama 

• 12am: Museums, Restitutions, and the Future of Colonial Collections 
  Bénédicte Savoy, art historian and professor  
  Anne Lafont, art historian and professor 
  Ibrahim Mahama, artist of the exhibition 
  Ced’art Tamasala, artist of the exhibition and CATPC member 
  Moderation : Aby Gaye-Duparc

• 1pm: Photographing Ghana’s Independence 
  James Barnor, photographer and artist of the exhibition 
  Damarice Amao, curator at the Photography Department, MNAM-Centre Pompidou 
  Moderation : Chiara Agradi 

• 2:30pm: Land, Plantations, and Extractive Industries 
  Agata Nguyen Chuong, architect, Forensic Architecture 
  Feda Wardak, architect and artist of the exhibition 
  Ced’art Tamasala, artist of the exhibition and CATPC member 
  Moderation : Jeanne Barral 

• 3:30pm: Transnational Solidarity and the Legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement 
  Tjaša Rener, artist of the exhibition 
  Zola Chichmintseva-Kondamambou, curator and cultural worker 
  Zohra Opoku, artist of the exhibition 
  Moderation : Aby Gaye-Duparc

• 4:30pm: Textiles, Craftsmanship, and Passing Down Traditions 
  N’Goné Fall, exhibition curator 
  Dorothy Amenuke, artist of the exhibition 
  Bernard Akoi-Jackson, artist and professor at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) 
  Zohra Opoku, artist of the exhibition 
  Moderation : Jeanne Barral 

• 5:30pm: Building Differently, Architecture and the Postcolonial Context 
  Meriem Chabani, architect and founder of the NEW SOUTH agency, Paris 
  Courage Dzidula Kpodo, architect and artist of the exhibition 
  Feda Wardak, architect and artist of the exhibition 
  Moderation : Aby Gaye-Duparc

Bernard Akoi-Jackson is a Ghanaian artist, curator, writer, and lecturer living and working between Accra, Tema, and Kumasi, in Ghana. He holds a PhD in Painting and Sculpture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, where he also lectures. His research and teaching focus on disruption, performativity, and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art practice. His practice as an artist is multidisciplinary and audience-implicating, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video, text, poetry, and dance. Through performative “pseudo-rituals” and immersive installations, he examines postcolonial African identities, with particular attention to bureaucratic procedures and colonial remnants that generate absurd, stalled, or circular situations. 

Born in 1968 in Ghana, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke lives and works in Kumasi, where she has been teaching at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) since 2009. She was the first female professor at the Department of Painting and Sculpture. Driven by a commitment to the community centered on care, sharing, and transmission, she involves family members, students, and peers in the conception and creation of her artworks. Since the 1990s, Dorothy A. Amenuke’s work can be said to represent a break from the academic heritage she received and offer a renewal of the sculptural vocabulary. Drawing inspiration from the materials of her everyday environment—patchwork blankets, pandanus mats, plastic bags—she sees textiles as a sculptural material in their own right, which she shapes like clay or wood.

James Barnor’s work (born 1929, Ghana) spans over seven decades, crosses continents and encompasses a range of photographic genres, from studio portraiture to outdoor photography. Considered a pioneer of African photography, he founded the Ever Young studio in Accra in 1953, a key place for Ghanaian society on the road to independence. In 1959, after documenting the independence of Ghana, James Barnor moved to London to improve his technical skills. He captured the vibrant energy of the capital in the 1960s. In the late 1960s, he returned to Ghana to open the country’s first color photography laboratory. Now 97 years old, James Barnor lives in London, where he devotes his time to the organization of his photographic archive and has a desire to pass on Ghanaian cultural and industrial heritage to younger generations. 

Born in 1999 in Accra, Ghana, Courage Dzidula Kpodo is an architect and artist. He studied at the Department of Architecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. In his practice, Courage D. Kpodo takes on the role of an archeologist of 20th-century material heritage, particularly of the architectural movement known as Tropical Modernism, which developed in West Africa following independence and then evolved thanks to local architects who adapted Modernist principles to the tropical context. Courage D. Kpodo has fashioned a critical reflection around this movement. Here, Courage D. Kpodo takes a step away from the monumental buildings traditionally depicted in archives to celebrate vernacular architecture. 

Born in 1976 in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), Zohra Opoku is a German-Ghanaian artist. Her work examines how political, historical, cultural, and social contexts influence the construction of individual identities. The artist’s parents met in 1975 at a university near Leipzig, in East Germany, as part of a student exchange program implemented by Kwame Nkrumah. A few months after Zohra Opoku’s birth, her father returned to Ghana, and she was raised by her maternal family. In her artistic work, Zohra Opoku reinterprets beads, ceremonial fabrics, and photographs inherited from her father. She screenprints these photographs onto antique fabrics before embroidering and assembling them. Her works draw inspiration from the various stages of her life: childhood memories, the experience of motherhood, the exploration of her African identity, and the ordeal of illness.

Born in 1986 in the former Yugoslavia, Tjaša Rener moved to Ghana in 2013, settling in a village on the shores of Lake Bosumtwi, before moving to the capital Accra in 2016. Her work explores how personal narratives and political legacies can intertwine, opening spaces for collective and transnational reflection. In 2022, she created a miniature gallery outside her studio in a working-class neighborhood of Accra, offering passersby and locals a program of exhibitions on a small-scale format. In 2023, she participated in the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in Slovenia and presented the installation Place We Call Home (2023). In the installation Between Arrival and Belonging (2026), Tjaša Rener brings together documents and photographs showcasing the political and emotional migrations of the non-aligned countries.

Bénédicte Savoy, an alumna of the École normale supérieure, has been a professor of art history at the Technical University of Berlin since 2009, where she holds a chair dedicated to "Art History as Cultural History." She is the author of numerous works focusing on the cultural and social history of the arts, the history of museums, and issues surrounding the spoliation of art. In 2018, she co-authored Restituer le patrimoine africain (Le Seuil/Philippe Rey, 2018) with Felwine Sarr. Bénédicte Savoy is a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 2016, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Ced’art Tamasala is a member of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). Founded in 2014 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the CATPC brings together artists and farm workers from oil palm and cocoa plantations. Deeming art to be a tool for economic and political liberation, the collective has financed, through the sale of its works, the purchase of agricultural land and the creation of an art center, known as the White Cube. In 2022, Ibrahim Mahama covered this with an installation of jute sacks. Here, the CATPC will present works created with products from the plantation: cocoa sculptures and embroideries on jute canvases resulting from the collaboration with Ibrahim Mahama. 

Born in 1991 in Peshawar, Pakistan, Franco-Afghan architect and artist Feda Wardak examines the effects of extractivism and imperialist legacies on inhabited environments. Since 2012, he has explored the effects of armed conflict on traditional water management systems in rural areas such as Jaghatu, eastern Afghanistan. In these territories where water governs both planting times and social organization, Feda Wardak has given himself the objective of collectively repairing karez, millennia-old underground irrigation networks. This commitment is also expressed through his artworks, like the Chercheurs d’eau (Water Seekers) series begun in 2024. Feda Wardak sees architecture as a tool that is political and collective alike, using visual, choreographic, cinematic, and sound forms to engage in repair, preservation, and the duty of remembrance.