JOJO ABDALLAH: PSY-TECH

Compound House Gallery announces that JOJO ABDALLAH: PSY-TECH is on the move. After the overwhelming response to Abdallah’s show at the National Museum of Ghana in Accra, SCCA Tamale hosts PSY-TECH at Red Clay for a traveling edition. Opening Friday, 25th October and lasting into 2025, the Red Clay edition will feature newly unveiled works, juxtapositions with Ibrahim Mahama’s archival collections, community interactions with local students, and collaborations with psychiatric hospital and mental health institutions in the Northern Region. The time-and-space portalling realities of Abdallah’s art bleed into the fabric of the exhibition, which generates new worlds across zones and regions.

JOJO ABDALLAH: PSY-TECH is an intergalactic exhibition that explores multiple dimensions and knowledge systems. Jojo Abdallah’s fantasy history paintings of Ga, Ghanaian and global culture become an opening for conversations around art and mental health, spirituality and science, tradition and transformation, and the pliable nature of reality. Conversational curating by Robin Riskin highlights Abdallah’s voice as the narrator of his own stories, and also creates space for a community of converging and diverging perspectives. Curating tactics follow Abdallah’s lead of mingling order and disorder, blending documentary and folklore, and mashing up language and culture.

As PSY-TECH travels north, Abdallah’s self-determined relationship to historical narrative meets Ibrahim Mahama’s creative freedom with archival documents. Similarly, Riskin’s social process curating-art meets SCCA Tamale’s socially produced, artist-led infrastructure. PSY-TECH | Tamale will be Compound House Gallery’s second initiative at Red Clay, following Hassan Issah’s tri-city show Kum Ase. The project represents a gathering of “worlds within worlds”, and an effort by artists to collectively take agency in cultural production.

Curated by Robin Riskin | Produced by Red Clay, SCCA Tamale and Compound House Gallery | in collaboration with the Accra Psychiatric Hospital and the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board | Support from Robin Beth Inc., Ghana Mental Health Authority, blaxTARLINES KUMASI