New Perspectives

PREVIEW

NANDO NKRUMAH – HEUTE SCHON MORGEN (TODAY IS ALREADY TOMORROW)

Exhibition from June 21 until November 3, 2024

The exhibition Today is already tomorrow in the Leonora Carrington Hall of the Max Ernst Museum Brühl of the LVR presents works of the German-Ghanaian artist Nando Nkrumah. With the New Perspectives format, contemporary artists explore new perspectives on Surrealism in the context of the collection.

Nando Nkrumah (*1979 in Kumasi, Ghana, lives and works in Cologne) invites visitors to wander between pasts, presents and futures and counters the current, dystopian forecasts of the future of the world with positive utopias. He combines personal memories, dreams and hopes as well as visions of the future of Afrofuturism with surrealistic elements. The artist directs our gaze to the fact that tomorrow already begins in our powers of imagination and emphasises the speculative spaces for possibility arising from this.

The exhibition Today is already tomorrow spans from the early drawings and prints through a series of recent portraits in oil and charcoal to digital pictorial worlds in the form of an expansive wall design. Conversations about the future with the people around him have inspired the artist to create multifaceted portraits that can be experienced audiovisually through sound recordings. They sound out a horizon of possibilities in the sense of Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism describes a cultural and artistic movement that occupies itself with the representation of Black people in future contexts.

Nando Nkrumah considers empowerment and the power of imagination to be the central pillars of his work. His alternative narratives play with elements of science fiction, fantasy and technology. They shift history, culture and experience of black people into a new, future-oriented perspective. Traditional and modern life worlds, cultures and their symbols merge into futuristic and utopian conceptual spaces.

Opening

Thursday, 20.6.2024 | 7 p.m.

Greeting
Madeleine Frey, Director of Max Ernst Museum Brühl of the LVR

Artist Talk
Nando Nkrumah and Patrick Blümel, Curator of the exhibition