What is CritLab?
CritLab strategically combines the formats of art academy, residency, workshop, laboratory, and professional development programme. This peer-led, schizo-pedagogical, and inoperative art school project emerged out of the conditions of radical precarity in the year of the global pandemic (2020). Exit Frame Collective– whose members are Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Adwoa Amoah, Ato Annan, Kelvin Haizel, and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh– inaugurated this project in a bid to broaden the critical intellectual infrastructure of art practice in Ghana. This ambition was inspired by blaxTARLINES KUMASI’s silent yet fugitive model of revolutionizing art education and practice in Ghana. Furthermore, CritLab traces its lineage to such antecedent twenty first century [counter-]mainstream initiatives as Àsìkò Art School– managed by Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos and founded by the eminent curator Bisi Silva (1962-2019); Independent Curators International (ICI, New York); Global Crit Clinic, the roaming peer-teaching network co-founded by Kianga Ford and Shane Aslan Selzer; and the Ofkob Art Residency founded by the artist Dorothy Akpene Amenuke in Ghana.
CritLab combines the following features to define itself:
- Exit Frame operates within the surplus of the collision between art and pedagogy. As such, the collective considers the latter as constitutive of a radically generative form of testing egalitarian models of producing, exchanging, and disseminating ideas. In other words, in testing methods of short-circuiting the asymmetrical flows of knowledge production in affirmation of the blaxTARLINES ethos of “transforming art from commodity to gift”.
- CritLab was established to contribute to the expanding intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana.
- It is designed for, but not limited to, artists, critics, and curators to build a network of art professionals who desire to push the boundaries of global art thought, production, criticism, and exhibition making.
- There is no participation fee. Exit Frame believes in this class-sensitive principle as one of the strategies for deterritorializing knowledge exchanges.
- The project affirms the egalitarian approach to pedagogy popularized in Ghana by kąrî’ka·chä seid’ou (whose non-proprietary art practice inspired the blaxTARLINES paradigm). That is to say, it is not necessarily ‘experts’ teaching non-experts (or ‘emerging’ professionals) about art, but rather a gathering of practicing professionals at various stages in their experiences who are producing, exchanging, and sharing knowledge in a critical community.
- CritLab could be described as an art school (that does not operate within the classical aims of art schools) which sets up new models of sharing. One surplus potential of this artistic, curatorial, experimental, and long-durational pedagogical project implemented by an artist collective– which is in turn generating its own alumni network–is that, it occupies the position as a “vanishing mediator” between what non-formal art education in Ghana is now and what is yet to come.
- CritLab aligns in spirit with Kwame Nkrumah’s mid-century materialist emancipatory politics and operates on the principle of “equality of intelligences”. Correlatingly, it mobilizes through anarchistic pedagogy (in the sense of “teaching how to teach” oneself à la Catherine Malabou), towards self-driven and independent practices in art, curating, criticism, and allied fields of practice in contemporary art.
- The broad theoretical and professional scope of the programme highlights the pragmatics of professional work (portfolio development, exhibition proposals, publishing, graduate study, research models/methods, documentation of work, etc.); creating infrastructure in conditions of hopelessness; constructive approaches to building relationships with other professionals and institutions, locally and internationally; coming to terms with the dynamics of the global art market; understanding the theoretical underpinnings of art history as inherited from imperialist structures and the necessity of emancipating professional practice; and incorporating more ways of creative thinking beyond human-centered approaches to making and thinking about art.