A Black woman in a workshop embraces a pale, anthropomorphic wooden figure. One arm rests across its shoulder, while the other holds its elongated body. Her head almost touches the sculpture’s spherical head. While the figure appears frontal and motionless, the woman directs her gaze beyond the frame. The monochrome portrait format transforms this simple gesture into a double portrait: two bodies, two different forms of human representation, and two distinct temporalities encounter one another.
The sculpture is a so-called PramPram figure from Ghana, a type of anthropomorphic wooden sculpture that has so far received only limited scholarly attention. Characteristic features include the highly reduced, often elongated body, tapering limbs, and a disproportionately large spherical or ovoid head. The eyes, ears, nipples and navel may be indicated merely by indentations; the nose sometimes appears only as a small ridge. It is precisely this reduction that gives the figures their strikingly modern, almost abstract appearance. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke
The designation “PramPram”, however, requires caution. Prampram is first and foremost a place and a Dangme community in south-eastern Ghana, east of Accra. The coastal Dangme include, among others, Prampram, Kpone, Ningo and Ada. ResearchGate At the same time, the figures documented to date do not constitute an art-historically well-established corpus comparable, for example, to the well-known Moba sculptures of northern Togo. Indeed, the information published thus far contains differing geographical attributions: some pieces are associated with the Ningo-Prampram area of southern Ghana, while others, on account of their formal language, have been compared with Moba traditions in northern Ghana and Togo. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke Until comprehensive field research has been undertaken, “PramPram” should therefore be understood as a working designation for a rare and still insufficiently researched complex of figures, rather than as a definitively established ethnic or stylistic classification.
A key figure in their more recent collecting history is Baba Sylla in Accra. Numerous examples known today can be traced back to his collection or to groups of objects assembled by him. In the provenance information provided by Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke, Sylla repeatedly appears as the person through whom these previously largely unknown figures first became visible as a coherent group. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke A field photograph dating from around 2010 also shows the German Africa researcher and collector Karl-Heinz Krieg outside Baba Sylla’s house with his collection. Shortly before his death, Krieg conducted further investigations and, according to the information handed down, made audio recordings near a hut in which such figures were said to have formed part of a shrine; he apparently was not granted access to the interior of the hut. These investigations remained unpublished. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke
The PramPram figures thus occupy an unusual position within the history of African art: they exist materially and have now been documented in considerable numbers, yet remain scarcely described in art-historical scholarship. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke states that it has by now assembled or documented more than 250 examples. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke Individual documented pieces are associated with more specific local traditions. One figure described as “Ningo-Prampram”, for example, is attributed to the village of Lectsoboi; according to the oral tradition recorded there, such figures are said to commemorate warriors or heroes of an eighteenth-century conflict and to have been kept in the centre of the village. Jaenicke Njoya Such information is exceptionally important, but in view of the limited independent research currently available, it must be treated as provenance information and oral-history testimony, rather than as conclusive evidence of a general function applicable to all PramPram figures.
It is precisely against this background that the photograph acquires its particular art-historical tension. It rejects the conventional mode of presenting African sculpture in the European museum: the figure does not stand isolated on a plinth, is not typologised against a neutral background, and is not regarded as an ethnographic exhibit. It is touched.
The embrace transforms what might otherwise be perceived as an object into a counterpart. Dark skin and pale, patinated wood, living body and abstracted body, soft anatomy and geometric form are initially staged as opposites, only to be immediately reconnected through the intertwined arms. The photograph thereby becomes a double portrait of human being and sculpture.
At the same time, this constitutes a reversal of a central chapter in the history of European modernism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, African sculptures were discovered by the European avant-garde for their formal radicalism and incorporated into the canon of modernism, while their origins, functions and the people behind these objects frequently remained invisible. In the present image, by contrast, the formal appropriation of the African object is not the central concern. African body and African sculpture share the same pictorial space and the same physical intimacy.
The workshop reinforces this shift. It is neither an ethnographic museum nor a white cube. Cables, metal, dust and machinery remain visible. The PramPram figure thus appears not as a timeless relic of a supposedly unchanging “traditional” culture, but as a material object situated within the present.
The photograph can therefore be understood simultaneously as portraiture, sculpture photography and a postcolonial reflection on the image. Its central gesture is not looking, but holding. The history of collecting African art — removal, transportation, classification and display — is, for a moment, replaced by an opposing movement: proximity, touch and physical relationship.
And perhaps it is precisely here that the strongest connection to the still unresolved history of the PramPram figures themselves can be found. Much about them remains unknown: who exactly the individual sculptors were, how far their original geographical distribution extended, what distinctions existed between different groups of figures, and what specific functions they fulfilled in different local contexts. The photograph does not attempt to fill these gaps with invented certainty. It allows the figure to remain a counterpart with a history that has yet to be fully told.
Note on the text: The statements concerning Baba Sylla, Karl-Heinz Krieg, the shrine contexts and, in particular, the figure of more than 250 documented sculptures reflect the current state of research and provenance information held by Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke. The available independent scholarly sources confirm the geographical Dangme context of Prampram, but there is as yet no established academic monograph that systematically examines “PramPram figures” as a clearly defined sculptural type. It is precisely this gap in the research that is exceptionally interesting — it should be made visible and documented through thorough field research. ResearchGate