Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
Look at the lower right corner of the blanket: an instant camera lies face-up among the green bottles and the bowl of pineapple, switched off, waiting. It is the one object in the frame that does what Idun-Tawiah is doing. Everything else is in motion or about to be — the trumpet half-raised, the woman in red lowering fruit toward an open mouth, the couple at the left swaying into a step — but the little camera holds still, a promise of pictures the picnic has not yet taken of itself. The photograph quietly contains its own apparatus, and with it a whole idea of what an afternoon is for.
This is the conceptual move worth noticing. Idun-Tawiah works in carefully built tableaux, period wardrobe and props arranged so that the scene reads at once as memory and as construction. The wide format here spreads the cast across the grass like frames of a film laid side by side: the slow dance, the reclining embrace, the music carrying off toward the sea. Time is not frozen so much as distributed — several tempos sharing one horizon, the flat Atlantic dusk pressing everything into a single warm register.
The setting is Saint Louis, Senegal, a departure from the artist's usual Accra and a sign of how far his restaged nostalgia now travels. He belongs to the generation of West African image-makers rethinking the studio tradition for the gallery, and his prints — pigment on aluminium, made to be looked at slowly — turn leisure into something deliberate. That dormant camera is the joke and the thesis: the day will be remembered because someone planned to photograph it. He already has.
Look at the lower right corner of the blanket: an instant camera lies face-up among the green bottles and the bowl of pineapple, switched off, waiting. It is the one object in the frame that does what Idun-Tawiah is doing. Everything else is in motion or about to be — the trumpet half-raised, the woman in red lowering fruit toward an open mouth, the couple at the left swaying into a step — but the little camera holds still, a promise of pictures the picnic has not yet taken of itself. The photograph quietly contains its own apparatus, and with it a whole idea of what an afternoon is for.
This is the conceptual move worth noticing. Idun-Tawiah works in carefully built tableaux, period wardrobe and props arranged so that the scene reads at once as memory and as construction. The wide format here spreads the cast across the grass like frames of a film laid side by side: the slow dance, the reclining embrace, the music carrying off toward the sea. Time is not frozen so much as distributed — several tempos sharing one horizon, the flat Atlantic dusk pressing everything into a single warm register.
The setting is Saint Louis, Senegal, a departure from the artist's usual Accra and a sign of how far his restaged nostalgia now travels. He belongs to the generation of West African image-makers rethinking the studio tradition for the gallery, and his prints — pigment on aluminium, made to be looked at slowly — turn leisure into something deliberate. That dormant camera is the joke and the thesis: the day will be remembered because someone planned to photograph it. He already has.