Let's be honest. When I first encountered Ebenezer Christian's work, I was not sure what to think. Masks assembled from scrap metal, mining debris, broken equipment, the waste of destruction that he has been collecting while the rest of us have looked the other way. It seemed almost too obvious, too on the nose, as if the artist were pointing at what we all already know. But I kept returning to those pieces, again and again, and something about them would not leave me alone. And that is what his artistic practice does. It does not let you off the hook. It forces you to keep looking, to feel the weight of what you have been avoiding.
Christian Ebenezer is interested in readymades. He always has been. The found object, the discarded thing, the piece of our world that we have stopped seeing because it has already become part of the landscape. But here he has taken that interest and turned it into a weapon, into a tool of confrontation that allows no indifference. These are not your typical readymades. This is not Duchamp's urinal or any of those conceptual sleights of hand that speak of art and nothing but art. These are objects that have weight, physical weight, yes, but also the weight of what they represent, the weight of the stories they carry, the weight of a country falling apart while we argue about other things.
He went to the illegal mining operations that are devouring Ghana, consuming its land at an alarming rate. Galamsey, a term that defines these workers, a word that comes from the English "gather and sell," a phrase that sounds almost cheerful, almost harmless. But in Ghana, Galamsey is much more than that. It is small scale illegal mining, done without permits, without controls, and of course without regard for consequences. It uses mercury and cyanide to separate the gold. It digs into riverbeds and leaves them dry. And the saddest part, what Christian captures so well in his work, is that Galamsey is not just about poor miners trying to make a living. Behind it there is a chain of interests. There are people with money who finance it, who protect it, and who profit from it all. The word sounds like community activity, but the reality that Christian documents is anything but that.
Process matters here, and it matters a great deal. Christian did not just imagine these masks sitting in his studio. It was not an exercise in abstraction or theory. He studied. He observed the miners at work. He spent time in those places that most of us avoid because it hurts to see what we have allowed. He walked through the devastation, through the ruined farmlands, through the poisoned water, through the forests that used to be forests and are now craters of desolation. After that he began to collect, to gather what others had left behind. Unusable tools, abandoned safety equipment, all those things that the mining operations leave behind when they move to the next site, when the land can give no more and there is need to find another place to keep destroying. There is something almost archaeological in all of this, as if he were reconstructing a collapsing civilization, as if he were raising a monument to what we are losing. It is all ephemeral in some way. And this is precisely what makes Christian's work complex and disturbing. Because these masks, the ones we see, the ones constructed from all that debris and waste, are not really about the miners. They are not a portrait of those workers. Christian is doing something more complex. Through collective memory, he is able to weave an additional layer of meaning that forces us to think beyond what we see. The pieces of the masks function as signifiers. They point to something else. They direct us elsewhere. The artist asks us to look beyond, not to stay on the surface, to see the landowners, the chiefs, the political figures, all those who sit in offices and line their pockets while others dirty their hands in uncontrolled and illegal ways. The real operators, those whose faces are covered by the most effective mask of all, denial, which allows us to point fingers without looking in the mirror. The ambiguity with which Christian works is not merely aesthetic. It is not a formal game for bored intellectuals. It is structural. It is political. It is deeply uncomfortable. Who is truly illegal, the man with the pan in the river or the man with the deed who leased the land knowing exactly what would happen? The mask that Christian reconstructs is precisely that metaphor, but it is also a kind of evidence, material proof of a system designed to keep us confused, so that we never quite know who to point at.
I think of that phrase that gives the work its title, "We Know Within," and how Christian uses it as a response to the rhetorical questions he raises. The answer is right there in the masks themselves, in the materials that compose them, in the story they tell. We know. We have always known, even as we pretend otherwise, even as we look away. Masks are only effective if we choose to look the other way, if we decide that it is not our problem, if we prefer the comfort of ignorance. The mask speaks of an undercover investigator, someone who hides their face to expose corruption, someone who goes undercover to tell what no one wants to tell. But the artist is doing that work himself. He is carrying out that investigative labor that others should be doing. He has gone where most of us would not go. He has looked at what we prefer to ignore. He has seen what we do not want to see and he has brought it back, transformed it, turned it into something that demands engagement, that allows neither indifference nor the safe distance of the spectator.
The construction and appearance of these pieces are deliberately crude, rough, almost violent in their execution. Nothing polished, nothing pretty, nothing that invites tranquil contemplation. Christian is not seeking beauty as escape. He does not want us to lose ourselves in form and forget the substance. He is interested in materials that tell the truth, that do not lie about their origin or their history. The rust, the dents, the wear of tools used to their limit, all of that is there to remind us that these objects have histories, that they have been used, that they have failed, that they have been discarded when they no longer served a purpose. And now they are being repurposed to ask questions that we should have been asking all along, to confront us with what we have allowed to happen.
I keep returning to this idea of the mask as both concealment and revelation, as that paradox that forces us to think in two opposing directions. On one level, the masks hide. They cover faces. They conceal identities. They protect those who do not want to be seen. But on another level, they reveal. They show us the mechanics of a system that operates in plain sight, that functions in broad daylight while we all pretend not to see it. The artist understands that the most effective masks are those that we do not recognize as masks, the ones we have normalized so thoroughly that we no longer see them, the ones we have learned to overlook in our everyday lives.
The battle against Galamsey has become impossible to win because we are fighting the wrong enemy, because we have confused symptoms with causes. We go after the miners, the visible ones, the desperate ones, the ones who are there because they have no other option. And we leave intact the real operators, those who profit from the system without dirtying their hands, those who sign the permits and collect the rents while the country bleeds out.
Art Advisor, Art Critic & Curator
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