‘Speculation and the Imagination'

‘Slavery’, contemporary Ghanaian artist, Godfried Donkor contends, ‘was based on speculation and the imagination, however macabre it may be and however … terrifying’. ¹ In his recent exhibition ‘Financial Times’, on display at the Hackney Museum throughout 2007, Donkor adopts an experimental approach to explore the slippery relationships between Western capital accumulation, the trade in enslaved African bodies and the transformative world of the imagination. His self-reflexive collages divest Western commerce of pretensions to neutrality by suggesting that ‘the history of finance, the history of companies and stock is just somebody’s story’. ² Rather than emphasising objectivity in a dispassionate accumulation of facts, Donkor draws viewers’ attention to missing histories via an experimental aesthetic practice. He works with layers of collaged fragments to accentuate rather than conceal thematic ellipses and moral paradoxes in his artworks. As he insists, ‘I stop when I feel that I have got something … which has a certain visual ambiguity’, on the grounds that ‘I’m not making a direct comment or a direct political statement as such but I do understand that it’s fully charged with political energy’. ³