Concealed Art

The figurative coffins crafted by the Ga people have been officially recognized as artworks since the exhibition "Les Magiciens de la terre" in Paris featured them in 1989. Their invention is generally accredited to the coffin maker Kane Kwei (1925-1992) from Teshie. In the book in hand, Regula Tschumi questions the art world’s established interpretation of the figurative coffins. She also examines for the first time those figurative sedans, little-known in western art, but furniture considered the likely forerunners of the figurative coffins. Regula Tschumi's work is based on several years of field research conducted in the region of greater Accra in multiple stages between 2002 and 2012. To learn more about the sedans and coffins, she studied the Ga's culture, religion, forms of artistic expression, history, and burial traditions. The sedans and coffins were studied in the context of an living environment, that environment from which they evolved and where they were once used. Only through this interdisciplinary approach could the author reveal the relationship between the figurative sedans and coffins and interpret their forms of artistic expression.