Before: Socialized, Circularized, Linearized, Artificialized, Corrupt Time
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom

Before: Socialized, Circularized, Linearized, Artificialized, Corrupt Time

For his extensive new multimedia installation Before: Socialized, Circularized, Linearized, Artificialized, Corrupt Time Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom constructs an exhibition of four distinct chapters, producing an ever-evolving dialogue and curation of space. By alternating the different modes of making foundational to Boakye-Yiadom’s multidisciplinary practice – including print, found material, film, sound and performance – the mediums are in constant conversation with each other. Exploring at once a conflicting sense of expansiveness and confinement, they act as vehicles to delve into the instability innate within cultural production, using both a personal and public archive to do so. 

Every two weeks a new chapter begins, a revision of space and the material that occupies it. Driven by research, the first instalment revolves around a video work; the second, a framed print and a vintage advertisement for Montego Bay, Jamaica; the third, a graphic print wallpaper of the Asian native Balltree (Calophyllum Inophyllum), photographed on a residency undertaken by Boakye-Yiadom in Italy; and the fourth, a montage of monitors, print and archival work. 

Spanning all four chapters, but positioned differently for each, is the steadfast photograph of Michael Johnson’s historic gold shoes, worn during his 200m and 400m victory at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, USA. This iconic image is reimagined as a full stop to encourage the audience to look beneath the guise of familiarity and question what we can see beyond the gold shoes – Johnson’s gruelling training, his losses and failures in the lead up to that moment. The image is conceptualised and deconstructed rather than taken as gospel for any given reality, time or experience.

A five hour metamorphosing soundscape also spans the duration of the exhibition. Originally made for Before: Flight as part of Nocturnal Creatures, a live event held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2019, this sound work is revisited and reworked through new instrumentation and introductions of live musicians: a trumpeter, a xylophonist, a drummer and a melodica player. With the ‘studio’ set up behind a curtain – which is either activated by the live happenings or enigmatically poised to host them – Boakye-Yiadom disrupts the relationship between viewer and viewed, and the expectations of bodies in certain spaces.

The installation’s experimentation opens up Boakye-Yiadom’s work to a new framing and implicit within these collaborations is an admission of the limits to the artist’s own knowledge and skills. With the sonic and visual in constant flux, the artist reveals that the freedom to explore comes with its own fragility, a necessary journey to deepen one’s understanding.

The title of the installation references Anthony Aveni’s text, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (1989), which explores the global history of timekeeping. Before: Socialized, Circularized, Linearized, Artificialized, Corrupt Time is therefore a provocation to question and challenge the linear conception of time and its correlated cultural moments. Cumulative in its layering, the exhibition evolves and embraces the resistance to any finite ending, reflecting Boakye-Yiadom’s intent to explore plurality, highlight cultural collisions and exploit the performative possibilities of cultural commodities, everyday objects, film, music and images.

With thanks to musicians Rosie Bergonzi, Alex Bonney, Matthew Gordon and Joe Ryan; Ander Cia; Lauren Gee; Geo Jordan, Hector Plimmer; and João Poppe Toulson and Sunun, musicians for Before: Flight.

Before: Socialized, Circularized, Linearized, Artificialized, Corrupt Time is generously supported by The Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment, Arts Council England, Omni Colour, Partizan and Rabbet Framing

Biography //

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom (b. London) lives and works in London. Selected recent exhibitions and performances include: ‘During: Compliments’, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2022); ‘Live Art Commissions’, The Roberts Institute of Art, London (2022); ‘During: Changeable Behaviour/Behavioural Change (Here Soon)’, Quench Gallery, Margate (2021); ‘Solos’, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2020); ‘Jerwood Solo Presentations’, Jerwood Space, London (2019); and ‘Before: Adaptive Rhythm’, Black Tower Projects, London (2018). 

Boakye-Yiadom received a Post Graduate Diploma from Royal Academy Schools, London (2008) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (2005).