CHAMPION FOR CHANGE

Curator, campaigner, cultural polymath: Nana Oforiatta Ayim is combining creative intuition with political acumen to bring African art to a global audience

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is something of a cultural juggernaut. As well as speaking English, German, French, Russian and Twi, a language from her homeland Ghana, she has worked for the United Nations in New York, been a visiting fellow at Oxford University and founded a powerful Institute of Arts & Knowledge in Accra. She is now in the process of opening her second museum in the city with David Adjaye, the architect of Ghana’s inaugural pavilion at the Venice Biennale earlier this year, which she curated. This autumn, Bloomsbury publishes her debut novel, and she will release the first of a 54-volume open-source cultural encyclopaedia of Africa, which she plans to complete in 2030.

When we meet at Tate Britain, Oforiatta Ayim radiates a thoughtful, academic serenity, with none of the hustle you might expect from someone who has 36 hours in London and a hundred things to do. ‘You know, it’s so funny being here. This is the place where I realised – on a school trip to see a Piet Mondrian exhibition – that art was for me,’ she says. ‘I must have been about 13.’

Born to Ghanaian parents, Oforiatta Ayim grew up between Ghana, Germany and the UK, before going on to study political science with Russian language and literature at Bristol University. This was followed by a spell working at the UN in the Department of Political Affairs, something she had always dreamt of doing, but with which she soon became disenchanted. ‘I wondered if I could make more impact by working with the arts,’ she says. ‘For me, it had always been about the intersection between art and politics anyway.’

Returning from New York to London with the idea of changing the global perception of African culture, Oforiatta Ayim enrolled on a master’s course in African art history at SOAS, and in 2002 put on her first exhibition, at the Liverpool Biennial. Her aim was to start moving work made on her continent out of the perceived silo of ‘African Art’ and onto a more equal footing, as well as attempting to break away from what she describes as the classic Western ‘white cube’, ‘look but don’t touch’ gallery model.

‘All the seeds for the Venice pavilion were sown that year in Liverpool, but carried out with a fraction of the resource,’ she says. For the Biennale, she showed artworks inside a series of chambers built in the style of regional Ghanaian architecture, using packed red earth brought over from Africa. Ghana-based exhibitors, such as the photographer Felicia Abban, were featured alongside diaspora artists; installations by emerging names were juxtaposed with wallhangings by the sculptor El Anatsui, whose works have sold for more than £1 million; and, crucially, Oforiatta Ayim ensured there was a 50:50 ratio of male and female exhibitors. The whole project was backed by the ministry of tourism. ‘That meant a lot – by putting their weight behind it, the government have shown that they believe in what art can do for our nation,’ she says.

Oforiatta Ayim is equally thrilled by the news that Tate Britain will next year hold a retrospective of the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits of fictional black characters were a highlight of her pavilion display. ‘For the generation before us, there was still that need to counter the colonial narrative that said Africa and our art are not as valid,’ she reflects. ‘But it feels like Lynette, working today, has the freedom to create beautiful works without having to assert or excuse her Africanness. Yet by saying, “This is my reality, and it is as universal as your reality”, she is subtly subverting the canon of white, normally male figures. Her work is quietly powerful.’

Increasing the presence of African art in major cultural establishments has been a cause close to Oforiatta Ayim’s heart since she visited St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum as a student, and was dismayed by the threadbare representation of Africa at what was supposedly a comprehensive guide to the world’s cultures. ‘There were literally three or four masks in a glass case with no context and vague estimated dates,’ she remembers. Since then, she and the curator and broadcaster Gus Casely-Hayford have worked with UK institutions, from the V&A to the British Museum, persuading them to accept and display carefully selected African objects.

Back in Accra, Oforiatta Ayim is turning her focus to her cultural encyclopaedia of Africa. An extraordinary concept in both scale and ambition, it will be produced in two formats: as an evolving online archive and as 54 bound books, one for each country. Although its aim is to explain and preserve the stories behind the each nation’s art in writing, Oforiatta Ayim doesn’t want oral history to die out: she likes the way word of mouth disperses and shapes culture democratically, in contrast to the ‘top-down’ system of Western museums, where acquisitions are valued and funded by a small directorial elite. ‘It doesn’t have to be one or the other,’ she says. ‘I am a product of both worlds, so in a way I’m trying to combine both.’

Oforiatta Ayim revisits her transcontinental upbringing in her forthcoming novel, The God Child, in which a fictional Ghanaian girl called Maya recalls growing up between Germany, England and Ghana. It would be easy to suggest that this is the most autobiographical of her endeavours so far – but in a way, she has been telling her own story, as well as that of her family and country, since she left school. ‘I feel this drive to make the world more relative in terms of different voices, different narratives and how we see each other,’ she says. ‘Of course, it all looks disastrous right now, with Trump and everything else… but at the same time, I think you can feel that we are moving forwards.’

With that, Oforiatta Ayim takes her pragmatic optimism down Tate Britain’s elegant staircase to explore the gallery’s latest exhibition – a solo show of the British-Guyanese painter Frank Bowling. ‘A Bowling retrospective – we might not have had that 20 years ago,’ she says, smiling. ‘Things are changing. I see it happening.’ ‘The God Child’ by Nana Oforiatta Ayim (£14.99, Bloomsbury Circus) is published on 14 November.