Bernard Akoi-Jackson

Faculty Biography

Bernard Akoi-Jackson (PhD), is an artist, curator, writer and educator who works from Accra/Tema/Kumasi. His interests cut across forms and media. His multi-disciplinary, audience implicating installations and performative “pseudo-rituals”, have featured in exhibitions like An Age of Our Own Making (Reflection II), Roskilde, Denmark, (2016); Silence Between The Lines, Kumasi, Ghana (2015), Material Effects, East Lansing, USA (2015), WATA don PASS: Looking West, Lagos and Malmö, Sweden (2015) and Time, Trade and Travel, Amsterdam and Accra, Ghana (2012 and 2013). He has co-curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES, most prominent being Cornfields in Accra, (2016) and Orderly Disorderly, (2017). Akoi-Jackson holds a PhD in Painting and Sculpture from the College of Art and Built Environment, (KNUST), Kumasi where he also lectures with particular interest in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art practice.  He curated the inaugural exhibition: “Galle Winston Kofi Dawson: In Pursuit of something 'Beautiful', perhaps…” at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Tamale, Ghana. His most recent engagement was co-curating the newly established Stellenbosch Triennale which opened in February 2020 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He uses among other forms, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, installation, photography, video and text. Akoi-Jackson  has often sought to deal with “postcolonial African identities” in his work. He is particularly drawn to such vestiges of colonialist encounter as overtly bureaucratic rituals that lead to absurdist stalemate. By means of paintings, performances, videos, installations and texts, he creates immersive situations that are both atmospherically dense and permeable to critical audience reactions. In his primarily performative and interactive works he initiates processes of action, reflection with a penchant for the disruptive.Ghanaian artist who lives and works from Tema/Accra/Kumasi.