Time and again, people are stigmatized and marginalized by communities for a supposed common good. Taking the remote Northern Region in northern Ghana as an example, the exhibition "Witches in Exile" is dedicated to the belief in witchcraft, which primarily turns women into scapegoats. Such beliefs exist in many regions of the world and are by no means limited to rural or educationally disadvantaged circles. Today, witch hunts take place in more than 40 countries.
On a joint journey through Ghana to Burkina Faso in 2005, the artists Ann-Christine Woehrl and Senam Okudzeto explored the contemporary persecution of witches. The special exhibition focuses on women who were accused of witchcraft. Envy and resentment as well as the accusation of being responsible for illnesses, deaths, droughts and other disasters made these women ostracized outsiders. Often in danger of death, they were exiled to so-called "witch camps". These villages, of which there are eight in Ghana today, are located in very remote areas, far away from the capital Accra. For this reason, few people in Ghana at the time were aware of their existence. Ann-Christine Woehrl shows these women in all their dignity and vulnerability - and with all their pride - in a haunting conceptual portrait series. Senam Okudzeto illustrates the broader context of the witch villages and the portraits in a multimedia installation - consisting of photographs from Ann-Christine Woehrl's extended archive as well as her own photographs, drawings and paintings made especially for this exhibition. Senam Okudzeto talks about their joint journey through Ghana to the Northern Region, where she and Ann-Christine Woehrl visited two very different "witch camps" - Kukuo and Gambaga. The works of Okudzeto and Woehrl illustrate the social and economic disparity that existed at the time between the northern regions cut off by the Volta Dam and the rapidly developing center of Ghana and its coastal regions with its capital Accra.
This attempts to embed the portrait series, which was created between 2009 and 2013 in the villages of Gambaga and Gushiegu, in a more complex geographical, temporal, social, political, religious and also economic context. The Museum Fünf Kontinente is taking the current political explosiveness of the topic in Ghana and the critical discourse there on witch-hunting and the closure of the witch villages as an opportunity to show Witches in Exile at this point in time. Ghanaian historian Gertrude Nkrumah addresses the socio-political issues of the current debate.
November 24, 2023 to May 5, 2024
