Art Exhibition: Theatre of Threads

Kofi Gadede — mark that name — isn't merely mucking about with yarn and canvas like some enthusiastic Ghanaian grandmother basking in the spirit retirement. Good grief, no! This chap is performing nothing less than a full-scale assault on the very nature of reality itself, armed with — and I say this without a jot of irony — crochet thread!

Cotton thread — the stuff of doilies and tea cosies! And yet — and yet! — in Gadede's remarkably deft hands, these humble fibres become positively Nkrumahist in their ambition. He's wrestling with the big stuff here, the profound philosophical questions that would give Professor Abraham a proper headache.

Stand nose-to-canvas — go on, get right up close — and what you'll encounter is an absolute Ghanaian salad of texture and tangle. It's chaos, entropy unleashed! The threads refuse — quite magnificently refuse — to behave themselves. They snarl and snag like brambles, demanding your attention with all the subtlety of a fire alarm at dawn.

But then — aha! — step back. Just a few paces. And kiss your teeth at me if the whole spiritual production doesn't resolve itself into something utterly coherent. Seamless! It's like watching a parliamentary debate transform from cacophony into... well, into something approaching sense. The discordant becomes harmonious. The fractured becomes whole. Truly remarkable!

And here's the thing — the really clever bit — this isn't just aesthetic jiggery-pokery. No, no, no! This is philosophyrendered in thread and glue. Gadede is showing us — with considerable panache, I might add — that reality itself is provisional, changeable, a matter of where you're standing and how you're squinting at the consecrated thing.

The choice of crochet is itself a masterstroke of conceptual chutzpah. Here we have an ancient, domestic craft — the sort of thing a countryside seamstress at Keta might have done whilst listening to the wireless — elevated to the status of profound artistic statement. Each knot, each painstaking loop, becomes a meditation on memory, identity, the narratives we construct to convince ourselves we know what on earth is going on.

But — and this is crucial — there's no moping defeatism here. None of that dreary postmodern despair that makes one want to stick one's head in a bucket. Rather, Gadede celebrates —the impermanent, the unfinished, the perpetually becoming. His threads are defiant little blighters, refusing to lie down and admit defeat.

So, there you have it! From 4th to 12th October 2025, at the Ka xoxowo Salon, get yourself along and witness this Theatre of Threads. Gadede has fashioned something genuinely profound from the humblest of materials — a testament to human ingenuity, resilience, and our magnificent refusal to accept that anything is ever quite as solid as it seems.

Cracking stuff — don't miss it!

Authored by V. L. K. Djokoto