Exhibition coverage at KNUST by Maria Olivia Nakato. Curated by Akosua Odeibea Amoah-Yeboah and Caleb Nii Asiamah Kwatey Quartey. Published [18th September /4pm]
Daniel Adjei Angmor employs experimental animation, photo transfer, LED lights, and broken flat-screen televisions to construct speculative environments that unsettle anthropocentric hierarchies. In spatial beans Act 1, he poses two intertwined questions: What constitutes life and who has the right to authorship? Through light, fracture, and animation, Angmor imagines a world in which machines, images, and viewers share agency.
Standing outside the exhibition venue, multicoloured lights flash through the windows signalling the presence of an active interior world. The viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to an irregular sculptural LED light drawing mounted on the right wall upon entering. The form takes an organic shape composed of shallow and elongated curves. It emits a flickering light that destabilises the space, saturating it with shifting colours and projecting outward into the surrounding environment. The luminous form appears animate, recalling the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures such as octopi. The gallery becomes an ecosystem rather than a neutral container.
Light from the LED entity reflects onto three screens hung on the opposite left wall by the entrance. These television screens are threshold between Angmor’s imagined world and the lived world. The audience views another reality while suggesting that the imagined world acts upon our own.
On two of the screens, Angmor animates hand drawings with flickering LED lights. Inspired by Hito Steyerl’s Strike (2010), he cracked the middle screen with a single strike of a hammer. This allows the light to pass through the cracks, creating the impression of something having escaped into our world.
At the far end of the hall, five screens extend this speculative terrain, two hung vertically and two horizontally. These consist of photo transfers of machine parts imagery taken in Kumasi, particularly in Magazine, the city’s electronic repair district. Through subtle animation with flickering light, these mechanical fragments appear inhabited, as if entities dwell within circuitry and scrap.
A large video projection of an image of an eye, followed by inverted still images of buildings and construction machinery, is displayed on the final wall. The inversion disorients perception, destabilising architectural certainty, reframing the built environment as unstable and contingent.
The exhibition culminates on the floor, where Angmor draws a creature in wet chalk. Two screens placed side by side function as its eyes, watching and being watched. The artist invites the audience to contribute drawings to the floor, transforming the gallery into a site of collective authorship. As the chalk dries, footsteps smudge the drawings, dispersing fine chalk dust across the floor with a light powdery film mixed with dirt. The image refuses permanence, continuously reconfigured through collective presence.
Angmor extends authorship beyond the singular artist. He disperses creative authority across human and nonhuman actors. Spatial Beans becomes an evolving site of shared inscription, where human movement, residue, and participation animate the work over time.
Images courtesy Maria Olivia Nakato and Edward Prah
Maria Olivia Nakato is a curator and writer from Uganda. She uses research, writing, and the curatorial to examine how we encounter, perceive and construct meaning around objects. Her work and processes adopts attitudes from Conceptual art and moves between close observation and material abstraction. Nakato views exhibition-making as a laboratory to make art objects an experience that alters the relationships between reality and what we perceive of it. The work instigated depends on an encounter of what can be seen or concealed.