Serge Attukwei Clottey

Serge Attukwei Clottey was born in 1985 in Accra, Ghana. His practice spans installation, performance, photography, and sculpture, and is primarily organized around his use of yellow gallon containers — the ubiquitous Kufuor gallons, named for a former Ghanaian president, used across West Africa to transport cooking oil, water, and fuel. He cuts, flattens, and sews these containers together into large, flexible sheets that function as paintings, sculptures, banners, or installation elements, in a body of work he describes as Afrogallonism.

A second, parallel body of work consists of mixed media portraits incorporating cork and duct tape — materials that carry distinct local resonances. Cork, commonly used in Accra churches and throughout the city to post public information, mimics the texture of skin as it weathers under sunlight. Duct tape, historically associated with constraint and violence, is recast by Clottey as a material of resilience and protection. Performance is central to his practice: his project My Mother's Wardrobe, first presented at Gallery 1957 in 2016, was inspired by the death of his mother and examined cloth as a carrier of historical memory, exploring kinship, gender, and spirituality through the act of wearing her clothing.

Clottey is interested in the symbolic and ideological life of everyday material objects and in how materials circulate in local and global economies. The gallon containers he employs originate in the West, arrive in Ghana as packaging for imported cooking oil, and end up as recycled infrastructure. By transforming them into aesthetic objects, Clottey reverses their flow and proposes a form of creative reimagination of what has been discarded. Symbolism is central across his practice, from references to Kente textile traditions to barcodes and Mandarin characters that index emerging global power structures. He is also the founder of GoLokal, an initiative through which he engages community members in large-scale collective performances.

Clottey studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra and the Escola Guignard in Belo Horizonte, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Art from the University of Brighton in 2019. He has held residencies at the DAAD in Berlin, Royal Museums Greenwich, and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Japan. He has exhibited internationally across Ghana, the UAE, the USA, the UK, Italy, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia, including at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, and has participated in the Dak'Art Biennale. He is represented by Gallery 1957 in Accra and London, and by Simchowitz in Los Angeles