After I Lost You

Samuel Baah Kortey's body of work in "After I Lost You" emerges from an archival interest in celebratory objects and diverse cultures’ visual and sonic commemoration language. It explores the fantastic act of dreaming and the lateral thinking of history and life journeys. The montages in the form of a sound piece, a large-scale commemorative textile tapestry, and collage and painting on paper and canvas are reflection tools that explore and highlight various colonial traces hidden in art academic spaces and cities’ substantial street visual language.

The exhibition expands the existing questions of the mundane, historical wills, spirituality, symbolism, and fantasies. It follows from Samuel's Library of Reflection series, which takes diverse forms depending on the location, energy, and space hosting the series, a series that explores what an archive could be and how it could be encountered. "After I Lost You" is a multisensorial presentation that mirrors the feelings of grief and longing for lost connections and dreams due to immigration and the pursuit of better opportunities. The pieces beckon the viewer to immerse themselves in a fantasy world, creating a deeply personal and emotional experience.

The two works "He Who Buys Love Never Stops Paying, Chitchats With Ana Paula, FRA- ACC-FRA" (2024) and "Hidden Presence, Cosplaying Dreams With Selam & Ben, FRA-ACC" (2024) reference objects of commemoration and celebration and the way the past has many ways of influencing the present. In the two works, we see two overlapping silhouetted portraits painted translucently over a layer of old school assignments the artist has been collecting over many years. The silhouettes, almost ghostly in their appearance, only offer outlines of people but not their identifying features. However, in the titles of the works the artist mentions specific people whom he got to know in Frankfurt, people with whom he shared experiences and ways of thinking (some content of their interactions perhaps faintly hinted at within the titles of the works).

As the artist considers the experience of moving between different countries (in his case Ghana and Germany), he also considers the places, people, and experiences one is in physical separation from depending on where they are. Due to this physical separation, one may miss or indeed grieve someone or a relationship even though the person or people are very much alive. And likewise, even in their separation and with this distance, one still carries the memories of certain conversations and encounters though some may fall away and be forgotten or ‘lost’. With the base of the works being old school projects, the artist further reflects on the remnants of systems of knowing, here specifically to do with the education system in Ghana which in its early development has been heavily influenced by the British colonial education model as the assignments themselves are linked to a very specific textbook that students would be taught through to learn about human anatomy – a textbook in which the diagrams and portrayals of the human body are all demonstrated using a white male figure. And layered atop the silhouetted faces are Baroque inspired frames made of paper, indicating a remanent of historical influence whose roots may be long forgotten but remains an ornament used to literally frame the faces of family and friends.

The triptych "Be Your Own Friend for Now, Moments With Ingrid" (2024) is another commemorative object through which Samuel Baah Kortey recalls his initial arrival in Germany, in a country he was coming to for the first time when he came to Frankfurt to study at Städelschule. A kind of personal continuation of his research into commemorative objects, rituals, visual cues, and language through a historical and societal lens, the artist here incorporates his perspective through his personal experience of first arriving in Frankfurt. His encounters with new people who would embrace him and help make him feel at ease, safe, and seen as well with its quintessentially “Frankfurt” markings that he would become familiar with over time.

For example, the green and blue pattern in the bar that the artist creates at the top of the first panel, in the center of the second panel and at the bottom of the third and final panel is inspired by the pattern the artist saw regularly in the textile that covers the train seats in the Frankfurt subways. This would be a pattern the artist would see and have a seat on quite often during his time in Frankfurt. This is also a pattern many others in Frankfurt would indeed be familiar with, perhaps even a kind of taken for granted familiarity. In the pattern, the artist embeds names of people he met and became close to while in Frankfurt, the top panel being the people he met when he first arrived, those who welcomed him and made him feel at home. The middle panel has names of people he met in the in-between space and time and in the last panel are names of people he met towards the end of his time in Frankfurt before he left and other people he is still in contact with even with the physical separation. The mummified figure depicted on each panel appears to be in a free fall, and the light blue background with its washed effect gives a feeling of water as the artist draws from the experience of being baptized, going through a particular and sometimes shifting experience – one in which the ground beneath you seems to give and you come out the other side transformed.