Art, matter, and memory: Allan Kyakonye and Frederick Ebenezer Okai in dialogue

Abstract

This article examines the material-driven practices of Allan Kyakonye (Uganda) and Frederick Ebenezer Okai (Ghana), and how they work with ordinary substances to think with memory and history. Methodologically, it combines close readings, exhibition analysis, hands-on curatorial fieldwork, and side-by-side comparison. The study focuses on Kyakonye’s medallion-and-cameo portraits—egg tempera on fire-scorched tinfoil—and Okai’s sculptural reworkings of indigenous pottery and alchemical clay experiments staged with immersive digital technologies. The study rests on three simple theoretical commitments: matter bears memory (Bachelard); African material cosmologies, such as those of the Dogon, remind us that substance and spirit meet in things; and the human and the nonhuman share the same ground (Meillassoux). From this vantage, materials in both artists’ work act as mnemonic agents rather than neutral carriers. Kyakonye stages the fragility of collective memory by pairing sacred iconography with marks of heat, abrasion, and decay. Okai unsettles linear heritage narratives through imagined crossings of cultures and forms of spectatorship that ask the viewer to move, linger, and look again. Together, their practices signal a turn in contemporary African art toward material poetics and make visible the exchanges that link East and West African scenes. The broader claim is straightforward: materiality is not a backdrop but engine—capable of reanimating history, opening futures, and proposing new sites of world-making.