The fourth edition of CritLab takes place in the city of Takoradi with an inevitable link to its twin-city, Sekondi, in the Western Region of Ghana. Exit Frame Collective will organize this version of its annual, itinerant, fifteen-day pedagogical project in partnership with Takoradi Technical University (TTU) Faculty of Applied Arts and Technology, Foundation for Contemporary Art - Ghana (FCA-Ghana), and blaxTARLINES KUMASI.
December 5 – 19, 2023
Takoradi is a melting pot of culture, industry and unionism, with a historical significance that reaches to the heart of independent struggles in the Gold Coast, leading to the eventual wresting of governance from the colonialists. This city is also home to a great number of noteworthy artists, musicians and practitioners within the creative field. It sits in close proximity to Cape Coast and offers some of the best examples of Ghana’s material and mineral wealth.
CritLab strategically combines the formats of art academy, residency, workshop, laboratory, and professional development programme, and aims to build a network of art professionals who desire to push the boundaries of global art thought, production, criticism, and exhibition making. As Exit Frame Collective’s flagship project, the project forms part of the collective’s efforts to broaden the critical intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana.
CritLab is open to 12 participants— artists, curators, and critics/writers— based in Ghana (this includes non-Ghanaians who may be currently based in Ghana) and is designed as an intensive programme adaptable to the framework of the applicant’s practice. There is no fee for participation, Exit Frame provides for meals, local transportation and accommodation for selected participants for the period of the programme.
CritLab absorbs participants in a schedule of site visits, seminars, screenings, thematic roundtable discussions, presentations and open studios that lean into critical studio practice, while addressing the processes involved in developing concepts, exhibition proposals, publishing, critical writing, documentation of work, accessing global resources, and professional profiles related to portfolio development, graduate study, social networking, among several others. Previous editions of CritLab have taken place in Accra (2020, University of Ghana, Legon), Kumasi (2021, Opoku Ware II Museum, KNUST & blaxTARLINES KUMASI), and Tamale (2022, SCCA Tamale, Red Clay, & Nkrumah Voli-Ni).
Since 2020, CritLab has operated as a hub for a wide spectrum of professionals from art institutions and universities in Ghana and elsewhere around the world who participate in the practical and intellectual exchanges. Individual and group advisement sessions, lectures, studio visits, and roundtable discussions are led by a global network of professionals which have previously included Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Director, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany), Nontobeko Ntombela (Curator/faculty at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa), Ibrahim Mahama (Artist/Founder of SCCA Tamale, Ghana), Baerbel Muller (architect, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria), Łukasz Stanek (Professor of Architectural History at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), Chiara Figone (Editor/founder of Archive Books, Italy/Senegal), Shane Aslan Selzer (Artist, teacher at Parsons, The New School for Design, USA), Nkule Mabaso (Natal Collective, South Africa), Gesyada Siregar (curator/writer, Gudskul, Indonesia), Nomusa Makhubu (Professor of Art History, University of Cape Town, South Africa) among others. The full list of this year’s guest facilitators will be published on our website in due time.
Program Dates: December 5-19, 2023
Application Deadline: June 22, 2023 [Late applications will not be considered]
Selected participants will be announced by August 8, 2023
*No fee is charged for participation and Exit Frame provides accommodation, upkeep and internal transportation during the programme.
*Please note that participants are required to attend all programmed sessions. Email exitframecollective@gmail.com with any additional questions.
Email all application documents to exitframecollective@gmail.com
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/exitframecollective
Instagram: @_exitframe
Twitter: @_exitframe
CritLab. 2023
Profile of organizing institution
Exit Frame:
Exit Frame emerged as a collective in 2012 after years of friendship, informal conversations and collaborations between its five members who are all based in Ghana: Adwoa Amoah, Ato Annan, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Kelvin Haizel, and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh. The group operates within the surplus of the collision between art and pedagogy. Within this excess is where the collective tests out what possibilities of emancipation art as such offers a native of the 21st century. For the collective, art exists as the beginning point to raise broader questions about material and immaterial universes. Exit Frame is co-curator of the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (September 15, 2023–January 14, 2024). The collective has also curated the group exhibition of Materials and things (2021) and co-organised the 11-day festival Pile au Rendezvous with La Condition Publique as part of Saison Africa2021 in France. Besides individual and networked projects spanning the fields of new materiality, pedagogy, curating, art administration, and artisanship– both in Ghana and abroad– Exit Frame inaugurated the annual peer-led pedagogical project and inoperative art school called CritLab in 2020 as part of its efforts to broaden the critical intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana. CritLab is a combined residency and professional development programme designed for artists, critics, and curators from Africa and other parts of the world.
Profiles of collaborating partners:
Takoradi Technical University (TTU) Faculty of Applied Arts and Technology
The Faculty of Applied Arts and Technology is one of the five faculties of the Takoradi Technical University. It started from the then Painting and Decoration Unit of the Building Department in 1952. The Fashion Department was also created; both grew and the Faculty was later christened ‘School of Applied Arts’ in 2008. Its name has currently been changed to the ‘Faculty of Applied Arts and Technology’, in line with the conversion of the institution to the status of technical university. The Faculty is presently very vibrant and very resourceful because of the currency of its programmes and the availability of highly motivated staff who work assiduously to ensure that market-ready students are produced for the job market.
blaxTARLINES KUMASI
blaxTARLINES KUMASI is an experimental incubator of contemporary art and a sharing community. It has a lineage of radical art and community projects dating back to the 1990s. It is responsible for demystifying art from classical and pre-1960s European modernist predeterminations in Ghana’s foremost art college in KNUST, Kumasi. Formalized in 2015, blaxTARLINES functions as a trans-generational and trans-cultural community operating on a generative model and affirmative politics. These operations are tactical responses to crisis points such as the general lack of public funding for contemporary art practice in the region. blaxTARLINES has implemented a broad set of initiatives toward the growth and sustenance of criticality in art practice in Ghana and beyond by building hard and soft infrastructure including co-developing cultural platforms, curriculums, residencies, social networks, studios, and public access art spaces. Through parenting and mentoring of start-up art incubators, the coalition builds upon and opens up avenues for artistic and critical exploration, while probing and deepening modes and bases of knowledge hinged on the universalist principle of preemptive equality. The community’s projects explore the interfaces between the non-human, inhuman, human, and post-human. blaxTARLINES KUMASI is affiliated with a growing number of schools, institutions, museums and art professionals across five continents. Among the schools and institutions in the network are Gudskul: Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies, Jakarta (Indonesia), University of Nigeria, Nsukka (Nigeria), Underground Contemporary Art (Uganda), State Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe (Germany), Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale (Ghana), Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos (Nigeria), Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) Ghana, HFBK Hamburg, Städelschule Frankfurt (Germany), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (Germany), and Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), Paris (France).
Foundation for Contemporary Art – Ghana
Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana (FCA) is an active network of artists created to offer a platform for the presentation, development and promotion of contemporary art in Ghana. It is a non-profit initiative that functions as a laboratory aimed at investigating new positions of creative curatorial and art practice in relation to ‘Contemporary African Art’ on the continent. Programs at FCA encourage dialogue, experimentation and explorations. Through these avenues, we aspire to develop and expand as we network and collaborate with artists and art organizations on local, regional and international levels. FCA organizes exhibitions, seminars, workshops and issues publications to raise awareness of and develop critical thinking about contemporary art and artists in Ghana.
Who can apply?
Applications are open to artists, curators and critics/art writers in Ghana who have been professionally active for at least 2 years.
Participants can be working in any medium– text, curating, painting, sculpture, textile, ceramics, photography, video, performance, installation, spoken word poetry, sound, VR, AR, etc.
Application Deadline: June 22, 2023
[Late applications will not be considered]
Selected participants will be announced by August 8, 2023
Our Partners
Since 2020 Exit Frame Collective has organised CritLab in partnership with Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale, and Opoku Ware II Museum (KNUST Museum)
