He decides to make series of portraits of black men, heroes, courageous soldiers, sometimes also influential women, who lived in a time or operated under circumstances in which their blackness had no negative connotation. Figures that are wrongly missing in the canon.
Serge Attukwei Clottey is attracting well-deserved attention for his striking installation The Wishing Well, created for the edition of Desert X 2021, in Coachella Valley, California. Composed of two large cubes covered in yellow plastic, the installation draws on Clottey’s signature use of cut-up plastic jerrycans, derisively known as Kufuor Gallons in his home country of Ghana
What took me by surprise back then, and what I tried to articulate in my answer, is that I was surprised that someone would be surprised that someone “with my background”, angry with and personally hurt by colonialism and slavery, could have an affectionate relationship with Dutch paintings from the 17th century. And yet, I feel at home with Pieter de Hooch’s The Country Cottage. I also feel at home at Paramaribo’s Waterkant. Both places pull me in with equal intensity, as if by teleportation. Both emotions: affection and anger towards two opposite phenomenons from one and the same historical period do not rule each other out, they coexist. Inside me there is no opposition. There is no true opposition.
