Deadly Prey Gallery, founded by Brian Chankin of Chicago and Robert Kofi of Accra, Ghana, teamed up some 13 years ago to conserve a tradition born of ingenuity. The duo aims to preserve and archive a 30-plus-year-old cultural phenomenon and support artists still working in the genre today: hand-painted movie posters.
Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong film advertisements were reimagined by Ghanian artists through vague verbal direction, a few purloined images, artistic license or a combination thereof, often producing illicit images with far more imagination, sex and gore than the actual films. Imagine, for instance, relaying the plot and characters of David Lynch’s Eraserhead through a multinational, multicultural, multilingual game of telephone.
Deadly Prey tours its unique assets in one-night-only pop ups across the country. San Antonio’s iteration drops in on Friday, Feb. 27, with a one-night only blowout at Mercury Project in Roosevelt Park.
Such images are the artifacts of an industry known as the Ghanaian Mobile Cinema, which began in the 1980s, when entrepreneurs armed with TVs, VCRs and portable generators traveled through the countryside setting up makeshift screenings, often in villages with little or no infrastructure. Video clubs soon became a mainstay, and in some areas found permanent homes in large cities including Accra, Cape Coast and Kumasi.
To advertise, the clubs hired local artists to paint original, one-off images on sewn-together burlap sacks. The results are akin to traveling sideshow posters produced during the death rattle of the American traveling circus sideshow.
However, these ephemeral, stylized and often bizarre images are unmistakably super-charged African folk art. Images are raw and reminiscent of hand painted West African barber shop menus, which were deemed highly collectible in the late 2000s — about the same time Ghanian mobile cinema came to an end.
Co-founder Kofi worked in the mobile cinema business as a teenager, and due to mutual trust and reciprocity, many of the artists from Ghana’s former industry continue to paint movie posters on a commission basis for Deadly Prey Gallery, where profits are given directly to the creators themselves. Many images are now available as affordable, high-quality prints, making them accessible to the general public.
Free, 6-10p.m. Friday, Feb. 27, Mercury Project, 538 Roosevelt Ave., (520) 395-6605, mercuryproject.net.
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
