Kelvin Haizel Ghana, b. 1987
Working in a variety of media that includes photography, painting and archival interventions, Kelvin Haizel investigates theontological question-what is the object of an image? His practice combines personal inquiry and emergence as strategies of experimentation across time to comprehend the manufacturing of images. After a long hiatus from painting, the artist has returned to the medium to engage with a visual language that is abstract, yet materialist and fictional.
He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Fine Art and Curatorial Practice, KwameNkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He earned his MFA (2018) and his BFA in Painting and Sculpture (2010) from the same institution.
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UNLIMITED III: The African Family
Curated by Marwan Zakhem 23 May - 13 Jul 2024The first and second iteration of this monumental group exhibition took place respectively in 2022 and 2023. Both editions, curated by Gallery 1957’s founder director Marwan Zakhem, invited artists from...Read more -
Kelvin Haizel - We Do Not Sleep To Dream
Gallery III, Accra 25 Jan - 14 Apr 2024PV: Thursday 25th January 2024 Haizel's approach to abstraction borrows aesthetics from local paint shop environments, wherein different surfaces exist as a swatch board for paint samples. The inspiration and...Read more
Haizel’s solo exhibitions include: ‘Archive of Experiences’, 8th Hamburg Photography Triennial, MARKK museum, Hamburg, Germany (2022) and ‘Babysitting a Shark in a Cold room: Comoros Encounters’, Zurich, Switzerland (2019) for which he was the recipient of A New Gaze 2 prize for contemporary photography.
Group exhibitions by the artist include: ‘Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part’ Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, USA (2022); ‘This is Not Africa-Unlearn What You HaveLearned’ ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark(2021), ‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’, Stellenbosch Trienniale, Stellenbosch, South Africa (2020); ‘Afrotopia’, Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017); ‘Oderly Disorderly’, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra, Ghana (2017). He was a resident artist at Hyde Park Art Centre in Chicago (2022) and a research scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago at the invitation of the Black Arts Consortium(2022).
Haizel’s work has been featured in articles and publications including Monopol, Over Journal, and Contemporary And(C&).