Godfried Donkor: "I use the Financial Times like DNA"

Interview by Antonella Pisilli, London, 31 August 2016

Recorded in London in the summer of 2016, this conversation with the Ghanaian-British artist Godfried Donkor moves between the three spaces his work inhabits, the one he comes from, the one he lives in and the one he imagines, taking in the pink pages of the Financial Times, collage as a form of drawing, and the deliberate collision of European and African art histories.

The interview is reproduced in full from the original transcript.

You are an artist working across two cultures, the African and the European, and you are interested in historical facts and sociological questions. What is the common thread running through your work?

For me it's very important that my practice looks at not only where I'm from, but where I am. I'm from Ghana, I was born in Ghana, but I've lived in London since I was eight or nine. When I started making art, I wanted to make art which was about all the spaces that I'm interested in: the space I come from, the space I live in, and the space I imagine, the one I would like to visit, America for example, or the Caribbean. So I make work about these three spaces, predominantly to show the interchange of cultures, of ideas.

I come to be in London because the English came to be in Ghana. Ghana was colonised by the English, so that means I come to London. I have a direct relationship with London, and for me this is a visual relationship. So I make art which covers not only Ghana but also Europe, London, and America and the Caribbean as well.

Many of your works use the Financial Times stock market pages as a background, with boxers or dancers drawn on them, depicted as saints with haloes. What does that element represent?

When I was looking for a kind of background for my work (my collages, my paintings) like you have in a theatre, the Financial Times started to come to my attention as a medium to use. If you look at the façade here in this courtyard, you can see it creates a set that we sit within, so that we're almost like in a theatre. I wanted to create a set for my collages, and I used the Financial Times for that reason: because it's pink, and it's about finance.

Secondly, because I wanted to talk about how all our lives in the modern world are dominated by finance. Whatever our issue is, whatever our motivation, ultimately, somewhere within that, finance comes in. And numbers are fascinating for me as well, almost like the DNA of my work. So I use the Financial Times like DNA, so that I can talk about figures: figures as in people, like sculptures, or figures as in numbers, one, two, three. This is something I find universal all over the world. Wherever I am in Africa, wherever I am in Europe, wherever I am in the Americas, there is a preoccupation with numbers. So it's a background for my work.

You work with collage. When did you start experimenting with it?

Collage really began in my college days as a preparation for my paintings. I studied painting, and painting is my main medium, but I used collage as drawing. At the beginning I was using collage for my studies, and then one of the curators that came to my studio actually wanted to show the collages as well as the paintings. So now I use collage as a medium in itself, but most of the collages I make are in fact studies for paintings that I'm doing.

Your work is full of references to classical iconography, and a deep knowledge of Western culture comes through. How much has it shaped you as an artist to live in Europe rather than in Africa?

I think as an artist, even when I was a student. Well, I was a student of art. And even as an artist now, I'm a student of art. As a student of art I'm influenced by culture in general, European culture in particular because I live in Europe, but I'm also influenced by African culture and Ghanaian culture.

What I try to do with my work by using neoclassical iconography is tap into the history of art in that culture. So I tap into the history of European art, as I go back into the history of Africa through African art, because I want to mix the two histories. My interest is in history, but I'm interested in how my personal history is combined within European history.

What are your plans for the future?

My projects at the moment are quite a few. I'm actually going through a period of transition where I'm preparing to produce work in different parts of the world. So I'm making work in Ghana at the moment, I'm making work in South Africa at the moment, and I'm doing a project for London for the future, 2017, 2018. So it's not a difficult time, but a strange time for me, as my studios are in different places. I have to go to Ghana to make some work in October, and then I'm hoping to be in South Africa in December and January, and then most of next year I'll be in and out of London and Ghana.

Interview conducted by Antonella Pisilli. London, 31 August 2016.