Martin
Toloku

I first met Martin Toloku in 2019, just before the world closed in on itself. I was in Ghana on a research trip that coincided with Chale Wote Street Art Festival, a moment when the city of Accra feels especially porous, charged, and open to experimentation. That year, Martin was performing at James Fort, the old colonial fort along the coast, a site saturated with histories of confinement, trade, violence, and forced migration. His performance was part of a section curated by and developed in collaboration with Ghanaian artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, also known as crazinisT artisT, his mentor at the time and a self-described gender-nonconforming, multidisciplinary artist and director of the perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR) in Kumasi.

Martin’s performance was durational and disarmingly spare. He lay inside a coffin constructed from discarded (termite-eaten) wood, remaining there for several hours. There was no spectacle in the conventional sense, no dramatic crescendo. Instead, there was a slow accrual of meaning through time, through stillness, through the insistence of the Black male body’s presence within a structure associated with death and decay. The work asked for patience, from the audience and from the artist himself. Trained initially through ​wood-​carving traditions learned within his family in Ghana, Martin’s practice has evolved from an intimate engagement with material into a broader sculptural and performative language of meaning and gestures​ that are​ rooted to place and memory. Wood, for him, is never neutral. It carries the residue of labor, architecture, land use, and transmitted generational knowledge.

This understanding of material as lived history is something Martin articulated to me when reflecting on his move to Europe in an interview in October 2025. “Working in Ghana is kind of different,” he explained, “because most of the materials from there are directly connected to my culture, my roots.” In Europe, that immediate relationship was disrupted. Instead of rejecting this rupture, Martin leaned into it, seeking out materials that already carried long, complex lives of their own. Old architectural beams, wood salvaged from demolished buildings, materials shaped by migration and labor economies became the ground through which he could reconnect. As he put it, “the best way to do it is to find the common ground, and also stories that can easily connect back to me.”

These questions have since expanded across geographies and disciplines, finding renewed expression in Mut@tion, a durational performance and installation developed in Europe. Inspired by funeral rites, ritual practices, and the everyday choreography of cycling culture in Amsterdam, Mut@tion (2023) stages the body as both machine and offering. Martin converts a three-wheeled bicycle into a funeral tricycle, transporting his motionless body from his apartment through the street and into his studio. The procession collapses distinctions between private and public space, life and afterlife, movement and stillness.

The slow procession of the funeral tricycle through the city streets suspends everyday rhythms, interrupts normative uses of public space, and transforms transit into ritual. Gesture, here, is not decorative but structural: the stillness of the body, the guided movement of the co-performers, and the reconfiguration of the bicycle all function as aesthetic acts that temporarily unsettle social order. In doing so, Martin’s work aligns with a lineage of African performative practices in which transgression is not oppositional for its own sake, but a necessary mechanism through which social meaning is re-negotiated, embodied, and collectively witnessed.

What connects Mut@tion back to the performance at Chale Wote is Martin’s sustained commitment to duration, endurance, and care. His more recent works are increasingly collaborative, involving multiple performers who guide, witness, and support the body through space. Yet even within these collective structures, vulnerability remains central.

Jareh Das,
an independent curator, scholar, and occasional florist navigating between West Africa and the UK, follows an interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on performance.