By John Owoo

(Atakpamé – Togo)

Whether formal academic training or self-directed learning offers a better pathway to artistic excellence took center stage during a panel discussion at Hotel Hong Kong in Atakpamé, Togo, as part of the ongoing Karp Kamina Artists and Researchers Residency.

The discussion, titled “In the World of Art, What Is the Pathway: The Academy or the Self-Taught/Street Artist? Where Is the Balance?”, brought together fine artists Frederick Bamfo, Livingstone Amoako, and Ray Agbo to examine how different forms of artistic education shape creative practice.

Moderated by Kojo Biney, with Samuel Olou, director of Karp Kamina, as French translator, the speakers discussed the benefits of formal art education, which provides structured instruction in drawing, painting, sculpture, art history, critical theory, and professional practice, as well as offering access to experienced lecturers, mentors, studio facilities, peer networks, and exhibition opportunities.

However, self-taught artists often develop their visual languages through observation, experimentation, apprenticeships, community traditions, online resources, and everyday experiences. Street artists, in particular, draw inspiration from public spaces, urban culture, political struggles, and the realities of communities whose stories established institutions sometimes overlook.

The discussion also examined how galleries, curators, critics, collectors, museums, and biennials influence which artists receive recognition. Questions arose about whether academic qualifications and institutional connections give formally trained artists an advantage in securing exhibitions, critical reviews, and market opportunities.

Ghana’s rich artisanal traditions offered another perspective. Practitioners, such as fantasy coffin makers, acquire specialized skills through apprenticeships, family knowledge, and hands-on experience, challenging the assumption that artistic expertise must originate in an academy.

The panel further considered how rigid teaching methods and inherited artistic hierarchies might discourage experimentation, while acknowledging that a lack of structured training can sometimes limit technical development and professional sustainability.

Ultimately, the conversation underscored the need for a fairer artistic environment where practitioners from diverse backgrounds can thrive. Academic training can provide valuable tools, but it does not have a monopoly on creativity. Independence alone also does not guarantee artistic excellence.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between the academy and the streets but to recognize the value of both and expand opportunities for artists to develop, exhibit, and contribute to the cultural landscape.

With a grand view of some of the seven hills of Atapkamé, Hotel Hong Kong has twenty-two well-furnished rooms, a conference room, a bar, a cozy garden, free internet, and a breathtaking view of the picturesque landscape of the city.

By John Owoo

(Atakpamé – Togo)

An abandoned German colonial building in Atakpamé, Togo, has become an unlikely meeting ground for contemporary art, cultural memory, and traditional African symbolism.

The exhibition Conversations: Symbolism and Lifestyle, featuring paintings and sculptures by Kojo Biney and Ray Agbo, invites visitors to reconsider how everyday gestures, communal relationships, and inherited cultural practices shape social life in African communities.

Presented as part of the ongoing Karp Kamina Artists and Researchers Residency 2026, the exhibition draws inspiration from Atakpamé’s cultural landscape, where Ana and Ewe-speaking communities converge. Known as the “city of seven hills,” Atakpamé offers a compelling backdrop for an artistic exploration of communication beyond spoken language.

The exhibition’s central premise is that conversation is not merely an exchange of words but a living social practice. In African societies, symbols often carry meanings deeply embedded in daily life, communal rituals, and relationships. Bargaining in the market between traders and customers, sharing kola nuts, and communal drinking of palm wine become expressions of negotiation, hospitality, solidarity, and belonging.

Through their paintings and sculptures, Biney and Agbo present these familiar encounters as visual narratives. Their approach invites viewers to look beyond the surface of everyday life and to recognize the cultural codes communities use to communicate, preserve knowledge, and sustain relationships. Here, symbolism is not merely decorative; it is inseparable from the experiences and traditions that give it meaning.

An intriguing aspect of the exhibition is its presentation of paintings alongside newspaper pages. This arrangement adds another layer of meaning, bringing together artistic expression, public information, and historical documentation. The newspapers serve as more than a backdrop, evoking memories of earlier times and prompting reflection on how history is recorded, circulated, and remembered.

The venue choice further deepens the exhibition’s significance. Housed in an abandoned German colonial structure, the works occupy a space steeped in a complex historical legacy. Their presence creates a dialogue between the colonial past and contemporary African cultural expression. For older visitors, the building may evoke memories of an earlier era, while younger generations can engage with that history through art.

Ultimately, Conversations: Symbolism and Lifestyle portrays culture as continually negotiated rather than fixed. Like the conversations that inspired it, the exhibition remains open-ended, inviting audiences to reflect on the symbols, rituals, and relationships that link generations.

By reclaiming an abandoned colonial space for artistic encounter, Biney and Agbo transform a building associated with the past into a place for examining, sharing, and renewing cultural memory.

The exhibition ends on Friday, October 16, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Atakpamé – Togo)

The historic Karp Kamina site in Togo has once again become a gathering place for artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners as the Karp Artists and Researchers Residency opened on Monday, October 5, with a vibrant display of traditional music and dance.

The opening performance by traditional music and dance groups set the tone for two weeks of creative exploration, bringing together participants from Togo, Ghana, Benin, Norway and beyond. Artists, academics, researchers, dancers, musicians and culinary artists are taking part in the residency, each bringing different perspectives to the shared task of exploring Kamina’s cultural and historical significance.

The program combines creative practice with research, allowing participants to investigate, interpret and respond to the site through their respective disciplines. Visits to tourist and historical sites around Karp Kamina have further introduced participants to the cultural landscape, inspiring their work and encouraging deeper engagement with the community.

Since its establishment, the KARP residency has sought to place Radio Kamina’s history within contemporary cultural discourse. Between 2016 and 2022, the program focused particularly on more than a century of Radio Kamina’s history, examining its legacy and considering how its past could inform conversations about the future.

Today, the remains of the historic site remain an important point of departure. Rather than letting the physical remnants and memories of Kamina fade, the residency seeks to preserve and creatively reinterpret the site, transforming it into a place where history, contemporary art, research, and tourism can intersect.

The ambition is to create an experience that attracts local communities, tourists, artists, and international researchers to Kamina, while encouraging a greater appreciation of its historical and cultural value.

The initiative also recognizes that meaningful cultural revitalization requires collaboration. Government agencies, ministries responsible for arts and culture, investors, the Chief and elders of Atakpame-Kamina, and local residents are among the stakeholders being encouraged to participate in the process and contribute to the site’s development.

The 2026 edition, titled “Cultural Revitalization II: Reclaim • Reimagine • Revive,” seeks to stimulate a vibrant local artistic community while creating opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue between local and international practitioners.

More importantly, it positions cultural heritage not as something frozen in the past, but as a living resource that can be reinterpreted through experimentation, research and creative practice. For participants, the two-week residency is not simply a journey into Kamina’s history, but an opportunity to help shape how that history will be remembered, experienced, and carried into the future.

Commune Ogou 1, DRAC-Plateaux, Perfecture de L’ogou and Hong Kong Hotel are sponsoring the 2026 edition of the residency.

By John Owoo

(Atakpamé – Togo)

The 2026 edition of the Karp Kamina Artists and Researchers Residency began on a high note as the Zogbéadji Band, officially known as the Association Culturelle et Artistique Zogbéadji d’Atakpamé (ACAZOT), delivered a magnetic opening performance that transformed the gathering into a vibrant celebration of traditional music, dance, and cultural memory.

From the moment the drums began to speak, the atmosphere shifted. Drawing on years of discipline and experience, the performers unleashed a powerful blend of energetic dance and frenzied percussion that immediately captivated residents and participants. Their performance was not merely entertainment; it felt like an encounter with a living cultural tradition, expressed through rhythm, movement, costume, and ritual.

At the heart of the presentation was the spectacular Tchébé dance, one of the most visually stunning traditional dance forms in the repertoire. Perched on towering wooden stilts that can reach as high as six meters, the dancers performed daring acrobatics with extraordinary confidence and balance. Their movements were at once graceful and ferocious, creating moments of genuine suspense as they seemed to defy both gravity and physical limits.

Performing alongside members of Association Artistique Humanitaire Oyékotan and Oresä Maku Maku, the ensemble created an equally commanding soundscape, generating an intense, ground-shaking pulse that seemed to travel through the audience’s bodies.

Among the instruments was the sacred Aran-Lakou, or grand talking tom-tom, whose deep, resonant voice holds significance in the local Ifè language and tradition. In the hands of experienced percussionists, the drum became more than an instrument; it became a vehicle for communication, ceremony, and collective memory.

Visually, the performers reinforced the music’s power with vibrant traditional costumes and fierce body paint, creating a striking spectacle that complemented the relentless rhythm of the drums.

A gentler counterpoint came from young kora player Marie Jo Atikpolater, whose soft, flowing melodies brought a moment of calm amid the intensity. Her playing showcased the evening’s remarkable range, moving seamlessly from explosive percussion to the kora’s delicate resonance.

As an opening statement for the Karp Kamina residency, the Zogbeadji Band offered more than a performance. It presented tradition as dynamic, physical, and enduring—capable of thrilling contemporary audiences while carrying a people’s memory and identity into the future.

Initiated by Norway based Ghanaian / Togolese artist Samuel Olou, KARP residency program allows artists, researchers, anthropologists, and historians to investigate and create. From 2016 to 2022, the program focused on reflecting on more than 100 years of Radio Kamina’s history and situating it within contemporary discourse to help shape its future content.

Commune Ogou 1, DRAC-Plateaux, Perfecture de L’ogou and Hong Kong Hotel are sponsoring the 2026 edition of the residency.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

War photography often arrives from afar, bringing images of destruction, displacement, and death to audiences who may never encounter the conflict firsthand. Congo, Close to Home, however, offers a different kind of testimony.

Presented at Dikan Gallery in Accra, the exhibition brings together the work of seven young Congolese photographers whose cameras remain embedded in the communities they document.

Aubin Mukoni, Arlette Bashizi, Gloire Chasinga, Guerchom Ndebo, Jospin Mwisha, Marie-Jeanne Munyerenkana, and Moses Sawasgwa photograph life in and around Goma, a city of more than a million people on the shores of Lake Kivu. Living under the shadow of conflict and occupation since January 2025, they document a society confronting violence while refusing to surrender its ordinary rhythms.

That tension gives the exhibition its emotional force. The photographs do not merely catalog war; they look at what unfolds alongside it. Markets continue. People dance. Couples marry. Children play. Families mourn. Graves are dug. Daily life, in all its fragility and resilience, endures.

One particularly striking image shows a boy playing football on crutches at a camp for displaced people outside Goma. It could easily be read solely through the language of tragedy, yet the football introduces another dimension: childhood endures even in circumstances that try to take it away.

This is where the exhibition moves beyond conventional conflict photography. Its photographers are not visiting journalists passing through a crisis. They are witnesses who live with the consequences of what they photograph. Their proximity creates an intimate visual record in which the line between photographer and subject blurs.

Curated by Paul Ninson, chief curator of Dikan Gallery, the exhibition also advances a deliberate geographic argument. Displaying these photographs in Accra reminds us that Congo is not some distant African crisis beyond the concerns of other Africans. From Accra to Goma, the exhibition proposes a shared continental proximity—geographical, historical, and human.

There is also an important question of authorship. In an age when images of African conflict are frequently produced for international audiences, Congo, Close to Home places the camera in the hands of Congolese photographers. Their photographs therefore become personal documents as much as news images, preserving details that might otherwise disappear once international media attention shifts elsewhere.

Ultimately, Congo, Close to Home is an exhibition about a city that is broken but not emptied of life. Its photographs insist that beyond the headlines and statistics are people who continue to love, work, celebrate, grieve, and dream. In that sense, the exhibition does more than document Congo’s war; it documents the stubborn persistence of life within it.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Memory rarely stays where we leave it. Undeniably, it stains, shifts, fades, and resurfaces in unexpected forms.

In What Stains, What Stays, currently on view at Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghanaian artist Cornelius Annor transforms this elusive quality of remembrance into a richly textured visual language, examining family, inheritance, and the objects that quietly witness our lives.

Curated by Ato Jackson, the exhibition draws on family photographs, online images, and scenes of domestic intimacy. Annor transforms these seemingly ordinary fragments into paintings with an unusual emotional weight. Moments that might otherwise fade into the anonymity of everyday life slow and gain permanence through paint.

Central to the exhibition is Annor’s experimental use of pigments derived from African textiles. When transferred to the painted surface, textile patterns leave translucent stains and traces across the canvas.

The process is both materially inventive and conceptually resonant. The migrating pigments evoke identity, cultural memory, craftsmanship, and lineage, while suggesting that remembrance itself is never static. Like the pigments, memories travel, overlap, and change meaning over time.

Annor also moves beyond the conventional boundaries of painting by incorporating furniture into his investigation of the archive. Wardrobes, mirrors, drawers, chairs, and other domestic objects emerge as silent witnesses to lived experience. Rather than serving merely as background details, they become repositories of memory—containers of moments, relationships, and histories.

This shift in focus is particularly compelling because it encourages viewers to reconsider the overlooked objects in everyday life. A table, drawer, or chair can seem insignificant until it becomes connected to a particular person or moment. In Annor’s hands, such objects acquire an almost biographical presence.

The exhibition becomes even more intimate with the inclusion of sculptures by Annor’s late father. Their presence offers a poignant meditation on artistic lineage and the transmission of knowledge—not merely through formal teaching, but through observation, proximity, affection, and care.

Annor describes the domestic objects in his earlier photographs as “frames or containers of a certain moment. They are witnesses.” That insight offers an important key to the exhibition. The archive here is not a static record but a living process in which photographs become paintings, textiles leave traces, objects become witnesses, and forgotten details regain significance.

Ultimately, What Stains, What Stays is less about preserving the past than about understanding its persistence. Annor reminds us that what remains after a moment has passed is rarely a complete image. Instead, it is a collection of stains, objects, gestures, and fragments—imperfect traces that continue to shape how we remember, inherit, and understand who we are.

The exhibition ends on Saturday, November 7, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Ghana’s political history has been marked by dramatic transitions, changing ideologies and contrasting styles of leadership. Yet beyond the official records, monuments, and photographs that preserve this history, one artist has chosen to remember the nation’s leaders in clay.

The Tribute Series: Flagstaff Edition is a 13-piece collection of relief busts inspired by Ghana’s political journey since independence in 1957. Conceived as an artistic tribute by Ebenezer Christian to the country’s heads of state and presidents, the series brings together the faces of leaders whose legacies, political fortunes, and places in the national memory have varied widely.

Led by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the series features Joseph Arthur Ankrah, Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa, Edward Akufo-Addo, Kofi Abrefa Busia, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, Jerry John Rawlings, Hilla Limann, John Agyekum Kufuor, John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills, John Dramani Mahama, and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The artist produced the relief series over 13 months, dedicating about one month to each leader. Working primarily in clay, the artist used relief modeling, a technique influenced by the low-relief features historically associated with coinage. The approach also reflects a longstanding personal fascination with relief sculpture.

Measuring approximately 12 by 15 by 2 inches, the works occupy an intriguing space between portraiture, sculpture, and historical documentation. Unlike conventional in-the-round busts, the relief format brings the faces close to the surface, creating an almost archival quality. The leaders appear not as distant monuments but as impressions embedded in history’s material.

At the heart of the series is the idea of equality. The artist deliberately avoids giving any leader greater sculptural prominence than another, instead giving all 13 the same artistic consideration. This becomes especially significant in a country where the public memory of political leaders is uneven. Some remain firmly embedded in the national consciousness, while others have gradually faded from popular memory.

The series therefore raises an important question: how should a nation remember its leaders? Political leadership inevitably produces different assessments, and the public reception of Ghana’s leaders has varied widely. The Tribute Series, however, does not attempt to settle those historical debates. Instead, it places the leaders side by side, allowing their faces to become a visual chronology of the republic.

In this sense, clay becomes more than a sculptural medium. It becomes a vessel for memory. The Flagstaff Edition reminds viewers that political history is not preserved only in textbooks, archives, and monuments. It can also survive in the artist’s hands—in the contours of a face, the imprint of a relief and the enduring materiality of clay.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Architecture is often associated with permanence—walls, roofs, foundations, and structures built to endure time.

At the Interstice, an exhibition at the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) that ended on July 31, 2026, challenges that familiar understanding, proposing instead that architecture can be provisional, adaptable, and continually shaped by the people who inhabit it.

The site-specific intervention transforms FCA-Ghana by creating a physical dialogue among the gallery interior, its courtyard, and the historic W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Pan-African Culture. Accompanied by sculptural fragments, photographic research, and speculative architectural drawings, the exhibition considers architecture not as a finished object but as an unfinished, open, and civic system.

At the heart of the exhibition is the concept of the interstice—the space between things. Here, the spaces between inside and outside, permanence and ephemerality, and formal architecture and everyday construction become fertile ground for experimentation. Rather than treating these spaces as insignificant gaps, the exhibition presents them as places where alternative ways of building and living can emerge.

The project builds on At the Interstice, first realized in 2025 as a temporary intervention at TTO, the studio of cradlelist artists in Kumasi. Responding to a site marked by continual adaptation, overlapping uses, and conditions of social and political precarity, the earlier project used lightweight shade netting, steel poles, and tensioned cables to extend the institution into its surrounding landscape.

At FCA-Ghana, these spatial strategies take on a new form. Their emphasis, however, remains on openness, reversibility, and transformation. The installation appears less interested in imposing a definitive architectural statement than in creating a framework that can respond to its environment.

The accompanying works deepen this investigation. Sculptural assemblages made from found materials, photographic studies, and architectural drawings document recurring spatial tactics observed across compounds, workshops, markets, and everyday constructions in Ghana. These environments, often shaped by limited resources, improvisation, and collective negotiation, are presented as sources of architectural knowledge in their own right.

This is perhaps where the exhibition becomes most compelling. It shifts attention away from architecture as something produced exclusively by architects and formal institutions and toward the ingenuity of ordinary people who continually modify and appropriate spaces to meet changing needs.

At the Interstice ultimately asks viewers to reconsider what constitutes architecture and who has the authority to shape it. Its temporary structures and fragments suggest that civic space need not always arise from permanence. Sometimes it begins with adaptation, negotiation, and the creative possibilities found between things.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Home, in Lucky Lartey’s In Transit, is not a fixed place. It is something carried, remembered, reconstructed, and sometimes painfully left behind.

In a work that brings together contemporary dance, visual art, architecture, and history, the Australian-based Ghanaian choreographer, dancer, and visual artist turns the experience of migration into a deeply physical meditation on belonging and displacement.

Originally presented in 2022 as a visual installation, In Transit returned to Ghana this year in a new phase of its creative development. Its transformation from installation to movement-based performance gives the work a new vocabulary, allowing the body to become an archive of migration.

At its center is a miniature house constructed entirely from Ghana Must Go bags—a material whose familiar presence immediately evokes the histories of movement, departure, and displacement across West Africa.

The material choice is especially potent. The Ghana Must Go bag is more than a practical container; it carries the memory of people forced to pack their belongings and leave. Lartey draws specifically on the 1983 mass repatriation of more than one million Ghanaians from Nigeria amid a severe economic and political crisis. That history becomes the performance’s emotional foundation.

At Jamestown Roundabout Square on September 3, the work returned to an urban landscape intimately connected to Ghanaian history and contemporary life. This was significant. Rather than presenting migration as an abstract international experience, Lartey situated it within a recognizable Ghanaian cultural environment, allowing memory, place, and movement to collide.

The four days of intensive movement research that followed the house’s construction explored the physical and emotional states associated with leaving, carrying, belonging, rebuilding, and searching for home. These ideas suggest a choreography in which the body is both traveler and territory—carrying traces of places left behind while negotiating unfamiliar spaces ahead.

The miniature house offers a particularly compelling counterpoint to the moving body. A house typically signifies permanence, stability, and belonging; the Ghana Must Go bags, by contrast, speak of mobility and impermanence. By constructing a home from the very material associated with forced movement, Lartey creates a powerful contradiction: the displaced person attempts to build permanence from the evidence of departure.

Ultimately, In Transit is less concerned with providing answers than with keeping questions alive. What does it mean to leave home? Can home be rebuilt elsewhere? When movement becomes a permanent condition, where does belonging reside? Lartey’s work suggests that home may no longer be a destination at all but an unfinished structure carried within us.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Internationally acclaimed Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama was awarded the insignia of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest cultural distinctions, last week in recognition of his significant contribution to contemporary art and culture.

The decoration was presented last week by H.E. Mrs. Diarra Dimé Labille, France’s Ambassador to Ghana, ahead of Mahama’s first major exhibition in Paris, The Harvest Season, which opens at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on October 22, 2026, and runs through February 28, 2027.

It represents official French recognition of an artist whose practice has increasingly shaped conversations about labor, trade, migration, colonial histories, and the global circulation of goods and people.

Mahama is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in contemporary African art. He also became the first African artist to top ArtReview’s Power 100 and win the city of Kassel’s 2026 Arnold Bode Prize, further underscoring his growing influence in the international art world. Indeed, earlier this year, he was honored as a Laureate by the Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II Art Awards, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to contemporary visual arts in Ghana and internationally.

His monumental, site-specific installations frequently transform materials associated with labor and commerce—including jute sacks, timber, discarded textiles, and industrial remnants—into expansive sculptural environments. Through these materials, Mahama interrogates the economic systems and historical forces that have shaped societies, particularly the legacies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation.

Over the past decade, he has become particularly known for his use of jute sacks and remnant textiles. In some of his most striking works, teams of workers stitch together materials connected to Ghana’s trading and agricultural economies, including leftover cloth from the cocoa industry, into enormous quilts that envelop buildings and other architectural structures.

Yet Mahama’s engagement with labor extends beyond the subject matter of his art. He has used his position in the global art world to create platforms for education, artistic production, and community development, establishing institutions and collaborative initiatives that seek to expand opportunities for artists and audiences in Ghana.

His exhibition history is extensive. Recent institutional presentations include Kunsthalle Bern (2025), Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, and Barbican Center, London (2024), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2023), Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2022), and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020).

Earlier exhibitions include shows at The Whitworth, University of Manchester, and Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016), and the K.N.U.S.T. Museum, Kumasi (2013). Mahama served as Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in 2023 and received the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the Dia Art Foundation.

His work has also been featured prominently in major international exhibitions, including Sharjah Biennial 15, the 18th Biennale Architettura in Venice, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (all 2023); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); the 58th and 56th Biennale Arte in Venice (2019 and 2015); and Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017).

Based in Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale, Mahama has also invested significantly in building cultural infrastructure in northern Ghana. His artist-led initiatives include the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), established in 2019; Red Clay, founded in 2020; and, most recently, Nkrumah Volini, all in Tamale. Together, these spaces have helped broaden the geography of contemporary art in Ghana and created new platforms for exhibitions, research, education, and public engagement.

Established in 1957, France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres holds a distinguished place in the country’s cultural policy. The order recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to enriching and promoting the arts and culture in France and internationally.

For Mahama, the French honor arrives at a significant moment in an already remarkable career. As The Harvest Season prepares to bring his expansive artistic vision to Paris, the distinction underscores an artist whose work continues to connect Ghana’s histories of labor, trade, and extraction with the wider structures of the contemporary world.