Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
61 x 61 cm / 24 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
She is the one being served, yet her own hand rests on the silver pot, mid-pour into a single white cup at the table's lip — the gesture that organizes the whole picture. A second pair of hands, cropped to anonymity at the lower edge, does the actual pouring; her grip is ceremonial, a held pose rather than a task. That small contradiction is where Carlos Idun-Tawiah's image declares itself as construction rather than document: this is a tableau, lit and arranged, every element placed to be read.
The reading rewards attention. Three fluted bowls in gilded blue march along the cloth like punctuation; the sage walls carry pinned snapshots of flowers, pictures within the picture, and a tasselled drape frames the right edge as if a stage curtain had been drawn back. The sitter's bridal-pale dress, pearl rope and sculptural cream hat compose a figure of deliberate poise against that mint field, her gaze meeting the lens with composed neutrality. Idun-Tawiah, born in Accra in 1997, builds these scenes the way a director builds a set — period costume, saturated colour, props that quote a remembered domestic interior — placing his practice squarely within the contemporary staged-photograph lineage of constructed African portraiture.
What keeps it from mere nostalgia is the precision of the staging itself. Nothing is incidental; the studied artifice is the subject. The serving of tea here is less ritual than mise-en-scène — a genre exercise in dignity, made for the wall, that knows exactly how it wants to be seen.