Elolo Bosoka on transforming onion sacks, charcoal bags, and other well-travelled materials into living archives of movement, memory, and exchange.
12 August 2026
For Elolo Bosoka, the studio has no fixed address. It unfolds in markets, streets, trains, and conversations – where ordinary objects accumulate traces of the people and places they encounter. In this interview, the Ghanaian artist discusses ‘Sabala Kotoku and Other Structures’ at Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, his expanded approach to painting, and why the artist’s role is not to overwrite a material’s history but to carry it forward.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: ‘Sabala Kotoku and Other Structures’ traces a journey across Kumasi, Copenhagen, Clermont-Ferrand, Karlsruhe, and Ettlingen. Rather than treating these locations as fixed points, the exhibition suggests a “third locality” shaped by materials and encounters. How has movement across these contexts shaped your understanding of place and belonging?
Elolo Bosoka: First of all, it is proper, I guess, to say that these locations are never fixed; I treat them as fluid points that feed into each other in terms of ideas and materials. The exhibition becomes a sort of perilous centre, a “third locality,” as you propose. It becomes a point of convergence that creates a diverse kind of situation for the works, the artist, and viewers. Regarding the question of place and belonging, I think that, again, nothing is fixed; there are often things that never change, such as smells, smiles, and food. But in these circumstances, my body becomes an object, constantly accumulating experiences whenever I visit or return to a place. I think it will be fair to say that my understanding of a place is based on the accumulated experiences I have had there and continue to have. Hopefully, my artworks can offer glimpses of these varied yet related encounters in a so-called third locality, namely the exhibition ‘Sabala Kotoku and Other Structures’.
Your practice begins with ordinary objects such as coal bags, tickets, receipts, and onion sacks, each carrying the marks of previous lives. What draws you to materials with histories, and how do you intervene without erasing those earlier narratives?
I think objects beyond their physical qualities give us more to ponder, especially when you are thinking about material as a line of inquiry. Marks that come onto objects, including patches, stains, and even smells, become viable variables to work with. As a painter, I have always looked for alternative ways to expand the notion of painting by stretching the possible palettes to invent and incorporate into the larger practice. Unlike, say, acrylics or oils, which could be considered almost nothing until you apply them to your canvas, paper, or, in some cases, wooden panels. This suggests that such media as oils or acrylics need not necessarily be mediated by one tool or the other. This could also imply that with such media, meaning is made after their use. Here, the artist expresses their mastery of the medium and skill in all their glory, reaffirming their position as the owner of the style and technique. This, in my opinion, should still be fine. In the case of my studio, however, the approach is to democratise the making process by holding space for narratives that the objects themselves may carry with them – allowing speculative collaborations between objects and everyday people who may have no formal knowledge of what art is. I think when we ascribe history only to what the eye can see, we tend to deny ourselves the possibility of accessing the intangible. The materials I collect and use come from contexts and situations that, amongst other things, seem very connected to systems of trade and consumerism. I think the deliberate focus on minute fragments of reality has the potential to generate paradoxical semantic shifts in how we interpret objects and their imagined lives. By foregrounding inherently insignificant or utilitarian objects, their functional contexts somehow dissolve, allowing them to be perceived anew as autonomous, yet complex subjects, defined primarily by form, colour, memory and promises. Ultimately, my role as an artist is to chaperone these histories forward, bringing them back into the fold and placing them at the centre of the conversation.
The exhibition proposes that objects can “look back” at the viewer, challenging the idea that materials are passive. How do you think about the agency of things, and what responsibilities emerge when you collaborate with materials that already hold memory?
As you have nicely put it, the exhibition space becomes active because of what the artwork already does. Objects or things in themselves have agency. When you collect and use them, the best one can do is to give space for this agency to emanate. Their ability to be active within the context of the exhibition brings a lot not only to the spectator but also to the situation that continually unfolds throughout the show. When objects become the centre of your practice, especially objects that hold memory, the best, I believe, an artist can do is to become a mediator, a listener, and sometimes a collaborator, preserving their agency. The notion that materials are passive has long been contested. We have to keep in mind that the exhibition space itself becomes an object, and the decision to make it active is a continuous attempt to frame the entire exhibition form as a situation. The Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe in Ettlingen uses natural light as its primary source – the windows frame the outside, while daylight illuminates the interior walls, bringing art and life together. For example, when I work with plastic sacks used for packaging, say onions or even charcoal, I think about how these sacks, as containers, are typically viewed. Under normal circumstances, the container is treated as a neutral entity because only its contents are considered important. But how do we shift focus so that the neutral sack itself becomes the centre of attention? We do this by paying attention to its materiality, what it is made of, the residues of usage, including marks, cracks, or patches left behind. All of these details become deeply relevant. When I approach objects this way within an art context, I take on the responsibility of preserving the histories they have accumulated over the years. Becoming art does not mean its history ends. Instead, the artwork registers all those histories simultaneously.
Your work engages with the legacies of modernist painting and minimalist sculpture, while simultaneously disrupting their assumptions about flatness, materiality, and the frame. What possibilities do you find in revisiting these histories from your position and experience?
I approach history as material. This is my opinion on the subject, and I guess this position allows me to be selective about which historical elements are relevant to my practice. Sometimes these histories can indeed be ideologies and attitudes that may have outlived their force, but if you have access to them, there is the possibility to choose what could become important again to work with. In my development as an artist, I find minimalist attitudes suddenly crucial once more, as they proposed a reactivation of the exhibition space and made the audience active participants within it. As an artist who started strictly as a painter, I have always been interested in alternative ways to paint that somehow liberated the painting itself. After being introduced to artists like Frank Stella, Sam Gilliam, and Alberto Burri, together with everyday situations from open markets, my understanding of painting shifted. Their deep sense of form, materiality, and activation of the exhibition space gave me a lot to think about. These studies were conducted alongside living artists, including Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, Atta Kwami, and El Anatsui, who have extended the field of painting in several dimensions. I think there are plenty of possibilities. There is a deep sense of satisfaction about revisiting art history, especially with artists and movements that have somehow paved the way for contemporary art. I think we can also measure how much the minimalist, Arte Povera, and other high-modernist attitudes have served as the foundation for newer approaches in art now. Today, I am among the many artists whose works still reflect those great beginnings that sent a wave through the art world at the time.
The orange mesh of Sabala Kotoku constantly shifts between transparency and opacity, forcing viewers to negotiate what can and cannot be seen. How important is uncertainty in your work, and what kinds of looking do you hope these interruptions encourage?
Sabala Kotoku translates as Onion sacks in Eʋegbe (the Ewe language). The sacks indeed come in shades of orange and sometimes red. For this particular exhibition, they have been used to create Dutch Onions, the exhibition’s centrepieces. Onion sacks are originally made with more perforations to allow air circulation and keep the onions from excessive heat. This allows the material to give a sense of lightness and transparency. We must also note that there are other works, such as structures, objects, photographs, offset prints, and paintings, in the show, which are organised to allow several entry points. The installation strategy was to focus on the works made for the exhibition and to use them as the basis for negotiating with the exhibition space. We played on the notion of transparency, which some works, like the two installations – Dutch onions and Through the eyes of Many – already provide. With them, the audience could see other objects and paintings from different perspectives. So, in the end, the element of uncertainty does not really count. I prefer spontaneity to uncertainty.
Much of your artistic process takes place outside the studio through walking, collecting, exchanging, and observing everyday situations. How do these ordinary acts become research, and what do they reveal that conventional studio practice might overlook?
Perhaps what is considered outside the studio becomes the studio for me. When that happens, every action I take – including walking, conversations, collecting, negotiating, collaborating, observing, improvising, adapting, and exchanging – becomes a research tool or technique for making new work. More importantly, this openness to working as an artist stems from an essential need to democratise the making process, so meaning becomes a shared experience rather than being determined by the artist alone. One of the major things I have learned at the Kumasi College of Art is the decentralisation of the artist’s studio. To put it bluntly, the artist’s studio can be anywhere, including open markets, garages, rooftops, inside trains and trotros, or even in situ. The traditional studio, enclosed by four walls, can be deeply limiting. In my case, it has increasingly become a place to slow down, reorganise, assemble, and store finished works. Outside, in the everyday, you encounter modes of making that you would never find within a traditional studio space. This opens up a more democratised creative process, one rooted in collaboration, shared knowledge, and direct exchange with non-art spaces and everyday people. These encounters enrich the work immensely. While “research” is often treated as a rigid, scientific term, for me, research is learning by doing. It happens through active engagement, conversation, and hands-on experimentation out in the world. That is how you understand the life of an object and the lives of the people connected to it. This approach to the artist’s studio arises from the need to compensate for the lack of access to affordable studio spaces for artists, especially in the Ghanaian context. Thus, alternative spaces become options to explore. In my case, I was fortunate to be introduced to the city as an open-air studio with a lot to work with. The lack becomes my luck.
Your works blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, inviting viewers to experience them physically rather than simply visually. What does this expanded understanding of painting allow you to communicate that a single medium cannot?
I think the answer you are looking for is already implied in your question. It can be boring to stick to one medium, especially when you can express yourself in many others. As a visual artist, I have come to discover colour in everything. That alone is a binding factor that can be communicated through a sculpture, a photograph, an installation, or even objects. My goal is to create a system of techniques and vocabularies that allows me to draw a fluid intersection between painting, objects, photography, installation, and collage. When you take, for example, any object and pay attention to its materiality, you will be surprised by how many entry points you can find. We see its colour, texture, mass, form, history, and the list continues. Ultimately, you are reorganising elements and principles of design in a way that seems pleasing to your eye and taste. A painting can take the form of an installation when it is free of the stretcher; we have seen this in Sam Gilliam’s earlier works with canvas. A sculpture can also be soft. One could take, for example, Through the Eyes of Many in ‘Sabala Kotoku and Other Structures’-you are presented with a free-floating installation piece that allows you to move around it, while you are invited to move up close to see its texture and colour. Painterly Objects (an Ongoing series since 2020), also featured in the show, is a photographic series driven by my curiosity about materiality and about blurring the boundaries between painting and photography. At the end of the day, it is simple to say that they both share the same rectangular frame as a basis for organising and composing. For Painter Objects, what enters the frame becomes notes on the mundane, with particular attention to colour, lines, patterns, and traces of human activity. At the end of the day, nothing should be taken for granted when it comes to art.
As a member of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, and with the collective currently participating in the 2026 Venice Biennale’s In Minor Keys, how do you see your practice in conversation with the collective’s broader commitment to rethinking contemporary art from Kumasi outward?
I think blaxTARLINES KUMASI has consistently provided a conducive space for artists, curators, and writers to work independently, collaborate, and produce projects that directly engage with contemporary issues. Being invited to platforms such as the Venice Biennale reinforces the idea that the work emerging from this collective context addresses a real global need. This stems from a quiet movement within the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST, where the curriculum was radically revised to meet the evolving needs of artists, curators, and writers within Ghana’s contemporary art ecosystem. My own practice would not be where it is today without this collective effort to build spaces for radical experimentation, which has allowed us to forge our own paths and advance our vision. Beyond individual practice, there is a collective responsibility to the next generation and to honour current and previous generations. How do we expose local communities to art? How do we bring art closer to people? We see this impulse in artists such as Ibrahim Mahama, who established the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Red Clay in northern Ghana, spaces that function as studios, residency hubs, and exhibition centres. This highlights the importance of building institutional structures beyond the collective itself. I often return to a core question posed by my professor, karî’kächä seid’ou: “How might we transform art from a commodity into a gift?” He describes this gift as non-reciprocal, given freely without expecting a return. That philosophy is deeply important to me. As an extension of my practice, I have founded a non-profit space called baseprojects, dedicated to creating space and infrastructure for emerging artists from Ghana and the diaspora. Through fluid and nomadic exhibitions, workshops, programming, and studio support, baseprojects nurtures the roots of creative production in ways that allow artists to retain their own agency. It serves as a bridge for emerging practitioners, artists, and curators completing their undergraduate or master’s degrees, providing a supportive platform for exhibiting work, curating exhibitions, and building critical portfolios. Navigating the field without a support system is difficult, so creating these structural stepping stones is vital. Ultimately, it is a personal commitment to expanding who gets to participate in art. How do we reach people outside traditional institutional circles, like my parents and their contemporaries? While I cannot bring my mother to Kumasi, I can build studio spaces and art hubs in my hometown that periodically bring artists together. Having lived through the transformative vision of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, I feel a responsibility to ensure the next generation benefits from that same open ethos.
This exhibition was on view at Kunstverein Wilemshöhe Ettlingen, Germany, from 20 June until 8 August 2026.
