Art, Matter, and Memory: Allan Kyakonye and Frederick Ebenezer Okai in Dialogue
Violet Nantume 
& kąrî’kạchä seid’ou
Issue: Vol. 6 No.12 Article 22 pp. 3187-3203
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561222 | Published online 27th November, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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.
Keywords: Materiality, Memory, Contemporary African Art, Experimental Ethnography.
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Violet Nantume is an artist, curator, writer, and the founding director of the contemporary art space UNDER GROUND in Kampala, Uganda, since 2015. As a cultural producer, Nantume has worked for thirteen (13) years with artists and curators in Eastern Africa, Ghana, South Africa, Angola and Germany. She is a regular contributor to ArtForum and Contemporary And publications; in 2022 she was the elected speaker of the Okwui Ewenzor Distinguished Lecture at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Nantume has curated BULUMA: AMAKOWOLA! (The Return) a solo exhibition by Buluma Ochungo Mordecai. She co-curated exhibitions; Silent Invasion: The Art of Material Hacking at Amasaka Gallery in Uganda, We Will now Go to Kpaaza: The work and legacy of modernist Uche Okeke, at the Iwalewahaus Bayreuth, That Those Beings Be Not Being, at the Alpha nova & Galerie Futura in Berlin. She curated; Muntu Maxim, an experimental web residency with Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Close, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Indulgence at Goethe-Institute Nairobi, Being Her(e) in Luanda, Zikunta: Gale of Human, Heart of Darkness, Cast a Light on Prejudice; A Photography Exhibition, in Kampala. She chaired the curatorial committee of the KLA’Art Festival in 2014.
kąrî’kạchä seid’ou (formerly Edward [Kevin] Amankwah) is an artist-intellectual, poet, mathematician, and educator. He is Ghana’s key figure in non-proprietary art and the architect of the “Emancipatory Art Teaching Project” that transformed the fine art curriculum of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. He is a co-founder of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, an art incubator and open-source community inspired by his non-proprietary art practice and pedagogical projects. karî’kachä seid’ou has mentored an impressive number of artists, curators, collectives, and writers of the millennial and Gen Z generations. He prefers to work silently, incognito, and only within Africa. He is the current Dean of Ghana’s renowned College of Art, now the Faculty of Art at KNUST.
Nantume, Violet, and kąrî’kạchä seid’ou.“Art, Matter, and Memory: Allan Kyakonye and Frederick Ebenezer Okai in Dialogue.” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 6, no. 12 (2025): 3187 – 3203, https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561222
© 2025 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
