Godfried Donkor was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1964, moving to London, England in 1973. He completed a a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (1984–89) and subsequently attended postgraduate courses in Spain, before completing an MA in African Art History at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London (1995). Donkor is best known for his collages exploring the socio-historical relationship between Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean in which a recurring theme is the relationship between boxing and the slave trade.
Mixed-media artist Godfried Donkor was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1964. He moved to London, England in 1973 aged eight. He later completed a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (1984–89), now part of UAL (University of the Arts London), during which he first developed his interest in collage. He subsequently attended postgraduate courses in Fine Arts at Escola Massana in Barcelona, Spain, before completing an MA in African Art History at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) University of London (1995). In 1998, Donkor participated in the biennale in Dakar, Senegal, which launched his career as an artist. Donkor’s artistic practice encompasses a wide range of media, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, collage and photography. He is best known for his collages exploring colonialism and socio-historical relationships between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. In particular, his work is concerned with the commodification of the black body in Western culture, as represented in the slave trade, sports, fashion and sex. Donkor declared that ‘I think as an artist, I re-create history […]. Not just black history because I don’t think black history is separate from the rest’s history. The work that I make is part of English history, is not just of black history. It is reciprocal. Histories are entwined’ (Villar-Pérez, 2018). In his collages, Donkor assembles historical, geographic and sociological documents recording the colonial history inherited by the contemporary world. As background, he often utilises gold leaf, creating religious-like images inspired by icons and early Byzantine, Roman, Russian and Ethiopian paintings he has studied. According to the artist, gold leaf is ‘a magical substance’ and also reflects Ghana’s history as the Gold Coast, a British colony (Evening Standard interview).
Donkor’s most engaging collage series features boxers. As he has explained, boxing evolved out of the slave trade and was regarded as a form of entertainment in slave societies, in which masters forced male slaves to fight each other (Something Curated interview). Donkor’s characters draw attention to the stereotypes to which they are linked and the association of these bodies with the idea of entertainment. Donkor uses 19th-century prints and 20th-century photographs, placing images of iconic boxers, such as Mohammad Ali and Mike Tyson, against pages with stock market figures from the Financial Times. As noted by Courtney J. Martin, ‘Donkor’s boxers become phantoms of the multiple histories of boxing, wherein they are bodily representatives of the slaves whose physical endurance produced the seeds of global financial capital and they are a metaphor for workers whose assent or decline is a matter of hand over fist’ (Martin, 2007). Donkor’s figures are often shown arising from historic sailing ships or vessels, a metaphor for the transportation of slaves from West Africa to the New World, or are depicted as saints with golden haloes, occupying a central position. As one commentator noted, Donkor ‘places his black boxer towering aloft like a giant above a cross section of a slave ship, which recurs as a diagram from painting to painting’ (Nicodemus 1999). Since 2008 Donkor has been working on a new form of collage combined with embroidery. In Financial Times: Dreams of Coats of Arms, a series which explored the movement of people from the Middle Ages to the present day, Donkor worked with Ghanaian embroiderers to create works where European coats of arms, now featuring African heads, were embroidered onto pages of the Financial Times. Donkor's installation Financial Times, exhibited within the Hackney Museum's display Abolition 07 (2007), focused on the contrast between familiar abolitionist icons and representations of enslaved black women and men, mythic figures, heroic freedom-fighters and political leaders. In his series Black Madonnas Donkor juxtaposed halos and soft-porn imagery to suggest the involvement of the Christian church in the exploitation of female slaves. In Madonnas, Donkor africanised the Christian subject of the Madonna and Christ Child by depicting an African woman, embellished with beaded jewelry, holding her child.
Donkor’s recent sculptures are inspired by the traditional adinkra symbolism of Ghana. Originating from the Gyaman people of Ghana and Ivory Coast, adinkras were similar to modern emojis and represented values, concepts, aphorisms, and often humorous representation of shared lessons, proverbs and philosophies. Donkor’s adinkras sculptures featured in his public commission for Denmark Hill station in Camberwell, London, unveiled in 2021. In 2022, Donkor contributed the work The Reality of Being Enslaved to The World Reimagined, a project which focused on the slave trade and its impact on world histories, in which artists, including Yinka Shonibare, Nicola Green, Julianknxx and Vashti Harrison, were invited to design globes to better understand the story and legacy of the colonial past. Donkor is represented by Gallery 1957, Accra and London. His work is currently held the UK public domain in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Godfried Donkor]
Publications related to [Godfried Donkor] in the Ben Uri Library