Jojo Gronostay

This work can only begin to hint at the enormous and powerful industrial sector behind the textile industry, with its complex ecological, social and economic implications.

Based on Salvador Dalí's 1948 painting of the same name, in which the Spanish artist contrasts the elephant as a symbol of strength and domination with the depiction of long, fragile-looking limbs, Gronostay refers, among other things, to the long history of trade between the European and African continents and the liminal space with the stilt walkers seen in the video.

When second-hand clothing first found its way to Ghana in the 1970s, the people living there could not believe that such high-quality garments had been discarded and therefore assumed that the owner had died. These items were called ‘Obroni wawu’, the Ghanaian term for ‘dead white men's clothes’. Addressing the issues of neocolonialism, identity and the value system of the Western world, multidisciplinary artist Jojo Gronostay founded his fashion label ‘DWMC’, ‘Dead White Men's Clothes’, and created a collection from used garments that he sourced and reintegrated into the Western context at the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, one of the largest trading centres for second-hand goods, and reintegrated them into the Western context, emphasising that this is an art project.

Like the stilt walkers – dressed in DWMC in this video – who act as spiritual figures between two worlds in many West African cultures, between the here and now, life and oblivion, heaven and earth, clothing also encounters a state of limbo, especially when it remains unused.

The prints on display in the exhibition document floor photographs of the trading place taken with a handheld scanner. When it rains, clothing is thrown onto the paths to absorb moisture and mud, making walking in parts of the market unsafe and unstable. The clothing, which soon takes on earthy tones, is in a state of transition – no longer wearable, but not yet completely gone, no longer acceptable, but not yet discarded. The intertwined search for identity between object and human meanders between the levels.