Regula Tschumi is a Swiss social anthropologist and art historian.
Regula Tschumi has spent time in East, West and South Africa, researching into contemporary African art.[1] In 2006 she published a standard work on the figurative coffins of the Ga people.[2] In this book she traces the origins of these coffins in the art and religion of the Ga, and questions the history of their evolution. In the course of this research Regula Tschumi discovered the coffin-artist and art brut painter Ataa Oko, born 1919, from La, in Ghana. Ataa Oko was making figurative coffins as long ago as 1945, that is to say, according to her, before Kane Kwei, who was generally recognised outside Ghana as having "invented" these coffins for the burial rituals of the Ga.[3] In her PhD thesis 2013 Regula Tschumi makes the first deep research about the formerly unknown figurative palanquins of the Ga. She shows how the figurative palanquins are related with the figurative coffins, and why the figurative palanquins were used in Accra as early as 1930. She discovered that differently from what many Ga believe, no chief has ever been buried in his figurative palanquin. Palanquins belong to the powerful royal insignias which in the Ga culture may never be buried. Therefore, kings were not buried in their palanquin, but in a coffin that looked the same like their palanquin. This was necessary because the Ga believe that enstoolments and funerals are complementary.[4]
Regula Tschumi has taken part in various exhibition projects in leading museums,[5] when she worked with different Ghanaian artists and coffin-palanquin-makers like Paa Joe, Ataa Oko and Kudjoe Affutu among others.
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