Shifting Between worlds
Inside Rita Mawuena Benissan’s One Must Be Seated and Nolan Oswald Dennis’ UNDERSTUDIES at Zeitz MOCAA
The Manor visited Zeitz MOCAA this past week and stepped into a dialogue between the past, present, and future. Two of the exhibitions — Rita Mawuena Benissan’s One Must Be Seated and Nolan Oswald Dennis’ UNDERSTUDIES — offer vastly different visual languages, yet both probe at the structures that shape identity, history, and power.
Through tapestry, sculpture, photography and video, Benissan’s work highlights and celebrates the rich traditions of Ghanaian culture, with a focus on Asante customs, focusing on the reimagining of the royal umbrella and stool, which are symbols of Akan chieftaincy. The exhibition explores the enstoolment of a prospective chief, akin to coronation; a call to take their rightful seat in the stool that has been chosen for them. “The exhibition layout simulates the enstoolment tradition with each successive gallery symbolising a stage in the process,” explains Beata America, the curator of the exhibition, and Assistant Curator at Zeitz MOCAA.
One of the key symbols of One Must Be Seated is the royal umbrella as it’s believed to transform the individual underneath it, attributing significant status. Different sizes, colours, and unique gold totems that crown the umbrella canopy are seen as they move with the court in a lively procession. Benissan reimagines these umbrellas in rich velvet, made by the same craftsmen who make the royal umbrellas for the palace in Kumasi, the Asante capital. By intentionally naming these artisans as collaborators, the artist honours the hands that uphold the traditions of the chieftaincy. The final golden throne at the end of the exhibition stands as a quiet yet commanding challenge: When the time comes, will you be ready to take your seat?
Dennis, on the other hand, fractures the very concept of inherited systems. UNDERSTUDIES is less about looking back and more about unsettling what we think we know in the present. His work is a study in disruptions — of geology, time, and authority — using installations, diagrams, and conceptual devices to unearth hidden structures of power. Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice.
UNDERSTUDIES offers a series of propositions to reconceive our own relationship to forms
of instruction and authority. Through a set of conceptual devices, the artist’s practice
subverts and contends with universalised and exclusionary perceptions of the ‘known’
world.
Both exhibitions meet at an intersection of power. Who holds it? Who inherits it? How it is sustained? Walking from one exhibition to the next is like shifting between worlds: from a place where lineage is a guiding force to one where knowledge is questionable. At their core, both exhibitions ask us to consider our own role in these systems — whether we are prepared to uphold tradition or deconstruct it, or try to find a way to exist in the space between.
