Timothy K. Gobah — Mixed media artist and fashionista
Self-portrait of Timothy Gobah.
If one were to encounter Timothy Gobah at an exhibition opening in Accra—and one very well might, for the city has a way of delivering its most interesting citizens to precisely the right doorstep at precisely the right moment—one would observe a figure whose work speaks to that most elusive of modern concerns: the distance between what we are told and what we know to be true.
Gobah is both mixed media artist and fashion designer, though such categories seem almost quaint when applied to a practice as fluid as his. Raised in Accra, nourished by the relentless current of popular culture and media that flows through our contemporary world, he has fashioned himself into something of a chronicler of illusion. His subject, if it can be reduced to a single phrase, is the relationship between media and truth—or rather, the space where one ends and the other begins, assuming such a boundary exists at all.
A guest from Timothy K. Gobah’s exhibition at the Ka xoxowo Salon.
At the heart of his practice lies a preoccupation with cycles. Birth leads to life, life to death, death to renewal. The same may be said of news itself. A story emerges, spreads like ripples across water, transforms with each retelling, takes on the character of those who touch it, until what began as fact becomes something else entirely—not false, necessarily, but altered by the alchemy of human interaction. Similarly, a garment passes from one owner to another, accumulating meaning, shedding its original purpose, becoming new again through the simple act of changing hands.
There is an irony here that Gobah appears to savor: in art, as in fashion, as in journalism, what is novel today becomes antiquated tomorrow, and what is antiquated may yet become novel again. The wheel turns.
His palette offers its own commentary. Black, white, and the occasional glimmer of gold—these are the colors that recur in his work with the insistence of a theme in music. They speak, one suspects, to the artist's conviction that the boundary between truth and fantasy is itself a fantasy. What we accept as real depends less on objective fact than on the biases we carry, the influences that have shaped us, the perceptions we have inherited or chosen to adopt.
The gold, perhaps, is irony's calling card—the shimmer of make-believe in a world that insists on its own authenticity.
A guest from Timothy K. Gobah’s exhibition at the Ka xoxowo Salon
There is something else in this palette, though. The stark division between black and white mirrors the polarization of our media landscape, which has largely abandoned the project of building consensus in favor of fortifying divisions. Race relations, matters of faith, questions of ethnicity—on these topics and others, the media does not unite but rather draws lines, plants flags, stakes claims. Gobah's work holds up a mirror to this fragmentation, inviting us to consider whether we are informed or merely sorted, enlightened or merely assigned to camps.
If his art offers no easy answers, that may be precisely the point. In a world saturated with certainty, with voices that proclaim rather than question, there is something quietly radical in work that insists on ambiguity, that finds meaning in cycles rather than conclusions, that treats truth not as a destination but as territory that must be constantly renegotiated.
Timothy Gobah, raised by Accra, shaped by media, creating work that interrogates both—such is the artist we have among us.