The title of Gideon Appah’s exhibition, Between A Life and Its Dream, refers to the common state between the harshness of lived reality and people’s aspirations for the life they wish they could be living.
The promise of the imagined often compensates for the reality, as long as it seems possible.
For impoverished people living in the slums of Appah’s native Accra in Ghana, the escape and the promise have more importance than for people living more tolerable lives in better conditions.
Appah’s new collection of paintings at his Absa Gallery exhibition evoke the desperation to hold on to the dream of another existence — encapsulated in the title of his work, One day I will be a Millionaire.
Not that he depicts a life of riches. He summons the opposite, evoking a gritty urban aesthetic that brings to mind scarred walls of an abandoned or makeshift building that has been occupied time and again.
Appah does this with scratched surfaces — lines drawn through paintings to reveal layers of colours, found objects and materials.
He faithfully renders the stark reality of shantytowns in Accra that he closely observed since childhood — his family home was located near one — and as an adult, photographing and collecting disused objects from places such as the infamous slum in the city dubbed Sodom and Gomorrah. While his art appears abstract, it could be called hyperreal.
There are several reasons why Appah is fixated with evoking these derelict and hopeless places. As a young man — he was born in the late 1980s — finding his way in the world, he has become acutely aware of how places mould people’s world-views.
"They can shape your character; what is good for you and bad for you," he explains in a phone interview from Ghana.
By all accounts, Appah’s childhood was a happy and secure one; he grew up in a rambling home with an extended family. "We all lived together, my aunts, uncles."
He appears to be prematurely caught up in nostalgia for his youth, which has translated into a fixation with buildings, places and objects that carry or communicate his history.
He abhors old photographs, he says. Middle-class people in Ghana tend to completely eradicate items evoking the past.
"In Joburg, people’s homes are a mix of old and new things. In Ghana, when people move into a new home, they fill it with only new things," he says.
Appah also uses numbers to evoke the past. They usually fix important events in memory, but he was inspired by the way winning lottery numbers are written on kiosks.
In Dreamed Pockets and Black Curtain he presents numbers in blocks that are crossed out and replaced by other sets. Lines running across some of his canvases, crossing out numbers or linking them, appear to evoke schemes at arriving at winning numbers in this constant game and dream.
The flow of wealth so rarely finds its way into the slums, yet serves as a reminder that an escape is possible. That such an outcome relies on winning a lottery suggests Ghana’s sociopolitical context is not a healthy one; education and jobs should be the path out of poverty.
Appah studied painting at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology where he obtained his bachelor of arts degree in 2012. He appears to have only started to make art seriously in 2015, when the Absa L’atelier Award was opened to entrants from the continent.
"There was a lot of buzz around the award in Ghana," he recalls. "It is was like a green light; my dream to be an artist seemed possible.
"This award makes you develop; you have to move forward, you have to work on it. I don’t know if my development has been too fast or too slow. A lot of things are happening in a short time."
The award opened doors. Following a residency at the Bag Factory in Joburg in 2016, Appah’s art began to pop up in exhibitions in the city and in Cape Town.
The Absa Gallery show is his first solo exhibition and later this year, he will exhibit in Germany. His lucky numbers appear to have come up.
Between A Life and Its Dream shows at the Absa Gallery, Joburg, until April 20.
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