Ghanaian art at Paris exhibit

500 years of Ghana's art contrast, complement each other at Paris exhibit

PARIS March 23 - A 500-year-old ceremonial mask shares the same space with a brightly-colored onion-shaped coffin at a rare exhibit of Ghanaian art at the Musee Dapper in Paris.

After wandering among golden rings, brass weights and terracotta sculptures on one story, visitors to the sole French museum dedicated uniquely to African art will come across an ornate green and white coffin at the top of a flight of stairs.

The contrast is a reflection of the different attitude most Africans have towards death, which in the West is largely a sombre affair, a museum official said of the exhibit.

``Death is not a drama, it is instead a way to liberate yourself from the image that many have of death,'' Gabin Bonny said. ``Its not an end but a beginning.

``So if people gathered to mourn someones death and celebrate his life are wearing red and white clothes rather than black, then why not have a coffin carved into the shape of an onion and painted green?''

The work is by the late Samuel Kane Kwei, who revolutionised both art and funerals when he began carving coffins which reflected a persons profession around the time of Ghanas independence from Britain in 1957.

It is said that his first customer, a fisherman, was so taken by the finished product - which resembled a whale - that he immediately fell to the ground and died.

The reverence for the dead also reflects in the dozens of terracotta masks and figurines on display, some of which date back to the 17th century.

The Akan people of southern Ghana made idealised sculptures with bulging eyes and shapely noses and lips, which were then placed in the grave along with smaller figurines of animals or people and plenty of food and drink to accompany the dead on their voyage to another world.

That part of Akan tradition has largely disappeared in contemporary Ghana. But respect for the dead and the powerful remains an integral part of Ghanaian culture, though it is now often intertwined with humor and playfulness.

The Accra artist Almighty God depicts the Queen Mother of the Asante people with a haughty expression and wearing traditional dress, but her eyes are hidden behind a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses.

In another painting, a verse from the Bible is reproduced beneath a huge yellow and white headline in the style of a reward poster: ``Wanted, Dead or Alive, Satan, USD500,000.''

Religious and spiritual traditions still count for a lot in Ghana, but contemporary artists are also more likely to take on political and social causes.

Almighty God is one who believes in a better world to come, as the museums curator Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau wrote in the catalogue, but only ``once the forces of evil have been fought and annihilated.''

``Ghana, Yesterday and Today'' is at the Musee Dapper through July 13.