Katie Young's Report
My research explores the influence of Hindi film songs in Muslim communities in northern Ghana. Through various trips to Tamale, the capital city of Ghana's northern region, in 2013, 2015 and 2016, I have explored the transnational trade networks that brought Hindi films to the region. I also explore the influence that Hindi films have had for music making in majority Muslim communities in northern Ghana, where Hindi film songs are reimagined, adapted and remediated in local recreational, folk and film music.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Ghanaian cinema businesses and video centers employed local artists to paint film advertisements of Hollywood, Chinese and Hindi films on flour sacks, to be displayed outside local cinemas and on advertisement vans driven through cities and towns. These bright, vibrant and vivid posters were painted for a multitude of Hollywood, Hindi and Chinese films featured at cinemas and video centres throughout Ghana. Artists did not replicate the images found in original movie posters, nor did these posters depict the intended plot of a given film: rather, these posters reinterpreted foreign films in a new context, drawing on themes, values and sentiments that resonated with Ghanaian cinemagoers.
When I came across these posters during my time in Ghana in 2015, I began to draw connections with my own research. Such syntheses of foreign film in local art reflected many of the questions posed in my own research: How did local painters consume, imagine and recreate images from Hindi films? Likewise, how do musicians and cinema-goers understand, alter and remediate Hindi film songs to fit within local culture? Such parallels expose the interdisciplinary relationship between film, art and music.
With the help of the Santander Travel Award, I collaborated with Deadly Prey art gallery owner, Brian Chankin, to host an art show featured at the Shiva Shack in Chicago, Illinois on 25 March, 2016, called "From Canvas to Cassette". The event showcased various hand painted Ghanaian movies posters of Hindi films from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, provided by the gallery. Drawing on my own fieldwork and archival research findings, I curated the event, designing accompanying contextual posters that provided more in depth information concerning Hindi film's origins, history and popularity in Ghana, and planned music for the event, including music from Hindi films featured in the posters. The night concluded with a short documentary film that I made during my fieldwork in Ghana in 2016. The film detailed various aspects relevant to the event, such as the history of Ghanaian hand painted posters, and the presence of Hindi film song melodies in local popular music. The film screening was followed by a question and answer period, which brought in to dialogue members of the community, scholars of West African cinema and art collectors who discussed remediation of foreign film in local art and music in Ghana.
In my original application for the Travel Award, I argued that collaborations between researchers and spaces of public inquiry, such as museums and galleries, are significant because they bring academic research off the page and into spaces for the general public. This event in Chicago was successful in bringing together community members, art gallery owners, musicians and academics to think across art, film and music, exploring the ways in which art, film and music tell stories about adaptation and remediation in new environments.