By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Last week, history was not merely remembered at the Christiansborg Castle in Accra—it was summoned through a historical theatre piece titled Echoes Through the Door of No Return.

Indeed, curator and director Dr. Abdul Karim Hakib transforms one of Ghana’s most significant sites of the transatlantic slave trade into a living theater of remembrance, where the ghosts of the past walk alongside contemporary calls for justice.

Presented in the wake of Ghana’s hosting of a Consultative Conference on Reparatory Justice, following the adoption of the landmark United Nations Resolution formally recognizing the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crimes against humanity, the production occupies a charged political and historical moment.

Yet rather than serving as a didactic lesson on slavery, it uses the language of performance—movement, music, ritual, and embodied storytelling—to create an immersive experience that is as emotionally affecting as it is intellectually provocative.

The castle itself serves as the production’s most powerful performer. Its weathered walls, courtyards, and dungeons become active witnesses to the horrors once committed within them. The audience is drawn into a journey that follows the enslaved’s trajectory.

From capture in the African hinterlands and forced marches to the coast, through the suffocating darkness of the dungeons, to the infamous Door of No Return, the site’s historical authenticity lends an unsettling immediacy to the performance, collapsing centuries into a single shared moment.

A cast of more than one hundred performers fills the space with an impressive physical and emotional presence. Choreographed sequences evoke collective suffering and resilience, while ritual elements draw on African traditions of remembrance and ancestral communion.

Directed by the Global Arts and Development Center, the production’s strongest moments arise when words yield to gesture, song, and silence. In these scenes, grief becomes palpable, and the audience is invited not merely to observe history but to feel its lingering weight.

Dr. Hakib avoids reducing the transatlantic slave trade to a narrative of victimhood. Instead, the performance foregrounds endurance, resistance, and survival. The ancestors who populate the work are not passive figures trapped in the past; they are active voices demanding accountability from the present. Their echoes reverberate through questions about reparations, restitution, and historical responsibility.

The presence of world leaders, including Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama and Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, along with diplomats and delegates from around the world, reinforces the work’s contemporary resonance. Yet Echoes Through the Door of No Return derives its greatest power not from political symbolism but from its ability to humanize an unfathomable history.

Part memorial, part ritual, and part political intervention, the production transforms Christiansborg Castle from a monument to suffering into a space for collective reflection. It is a theater that refuses comfort, insisting that memory remains an ethical act—and that the journey toward justice begins by listening to the echoes history still carries.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

An intriguing dialogue among memory, identity, and the everyday unfolded at the Mix Design Gallery in Accra through a group exhibition featuring five Ghanaian artists whose practices examine the systems and experiences that shape contemporary life.

The show, which ended on Thursday, June 4, though diverse in medium and approach, shares a commitment among the participating artists to transform ordinary materials and familiar narratives into reflections on society, heritage, and belonging.

At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of the conditions that shape human experience. From environmental concerns and urban infrastructure to cultural memory and personal identity, the works invite viewers to consider how people navigate and negotiate the realities around them.

Opoku Eric Asare draws on the enduring legacy of Ghanaian highlife music through paintings, sculptures, and photographic interventions inspired by family albums from the 1990s. His layered compositions bridge past and present, translating memories into tactile forms that evoke nostalgia while underscoring the ongoing relevance of cultural histories. Through overlapping shapes and vibrant colors, Asare reveals memory as a constantly shifting, re-emerging force.

Environmental consciousness is evident in the works of Emmanuel Afriyie Arthur, who transforms discarded plastic bottle caps into dynamic sculptural surfaces. Rooted in the rhythms of Kumasi’s urban environment, his works speak to waste, resilience, and collective responsibility. By elevating neglected materials, Arthur turns refuse into symbols of renewal and social reflection.

Transportation and movement are the focus of Kwabena Fordjour’s practice. Drawing inspiration from bus stations, taxi ranks, and the rituals of daily commuting, he presents mobility as a social network that connects communities and shapes relationships. His observations of ordinary urban life celebrate the subtle interactions and solidarities embedded in Ghana’s transportation culture.

Meanwhile, Kwasi Darko uses photography, digital media, and lenticular technology to foreground often-overlooked stories. His works serve as bridges between intimate experiences and broader social realities, offering layered perspectives on representation, belonging, and community. Through shifting visual planes, Darko expands the possibilities of storytelling in contemporary art.

Completing the exhibition is Dela Quarshie, whose paintings inhabit the space between figuration and abstraction. Fragmented forms and repeated gestures suggest that identity is fluid and continually evolving. Themes of presence and absence run through the works, inviting contemplation of how the self is constructed, concealed, and transformed.

Rather than presenting isolated artistic statements, the exhibition, which is titled Conditions/Encounters, functions as a conversation. Together, the five artists show how contemporary Ghanaian art continues to engage pressing social questions while finding poetry in memory, movement, and material transformation.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

An inaugural exhibition of works by British artist Helen Annobil, revealing a compelling narrative of self-discovery, artistic renewal, and belonging, is underway at the Annobil Contemporary Gallery in Accra.  

The exhibition marks a significant turning point in Helen Annobil’s career, reflecting a resolution of artistic inquiry after nearly six decades of gradual development as an artist and nurse in England. The title—“Terra Firma” (Latin for firm ground)—aptly suggests that the artist has finally found a place of certainty and creative confidence in Ghana.

The exhibition owes much of its vitality to Annobil’s three years of living and working in Ghana. During this period, she absorbed the rhythms of everyday life, the richness of local landscapes, and the vibrancy of Ghanaian culture. These experiences have profoundly shaped her visual language, opening a palette marked by bold color, expressive freedom, dynamism, and an unrestrained engagement with the sensory world.

The resulting works are powerful and evocative. Sweeping landscapes and still-life compositions capture fleeting moments, transforming them into expansive visual experiences. Annobil’s paintings reveal an expressive, occasionally surreal sensibility that embraces distortion, disproportionality, and unconventional perspectives. 

While echoes of European masters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Wassily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec may be discerned, these influences serve less as direct references than as elements of a broader artistic vocabulary that Annobil reinterprets through her experiences and Ghanaian environment.

Curated by acclaimed Ghanaian artist and curator Kofi Setordji, Terra Firma is positioned as a significant contribution to Ghana’s contemporary art discourse. Setordji, winner of the Leisure Award Sculptor of the Year Prize (1990) and recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2008), approaches the exhibition with a light yet insightful touch. His curatorial framework allows the diversity of Annobil’s practice to emerge organically, highlighting her varied themes, stylistic shifts, and sophisticated command of color.

What ultimately distinguishes Terra Firma is the authenticity of Annobil’s artistic voice. Largely self-taught, she works outside academic orthodoxy, guided by intuition, observation, and emotional responsiveness. Her paintings have a stream-of-consciousness quality that can seem spontaneous, yet beneath this immediacy lies a carefully developed conceptual foundation. The works reveal an artist deeply attuned to her inner world and surroundings, transforming personal experience into richly textured visual narratives.

In Terra Firma, Helen Annobil offers not merely an exhibition of paintings but a declaration of artistic arrival. It is the work of an artist who has found firm ground from which to look outward, inward, and beyond.

Founded by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil, the Gallery is a dynamic showcase of art from all cultures. Terra Firma makes that dream indelible and raises the bar for art curation in Ghana. It is dedicated to celebrating great art across borders and to updating Africa’s role, from a supplier of art to the outside world to a center for international exposition. 

Through this strategy, the founder challenges the hackneyed definitions of African art, which continue to distort its meaning to this day. Annobil Contemporary incorporates Obsidian Tavern, a bohemian watering hole that doubles as a second art gallery, Kiln, and a gift shop featuring exquisite traditional pottery and other crafts.

The gallery has an open-house policy that supports graduation exhibitions, residencies, and internships. It encourages spontaneous performances, recitals, and artistic interventions. It is also available for hire for private events and functions.

The exhibition ends on Tuesday, June 30, 2026

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

An exhibition of works by Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi, featuring experimental large-format photographs, purpose-built and modified pinhole cameras used to produce them, process notes and annotations, and a library activation, is on view at the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) in Accra. 

At first glance, it appears to be an exhibition about photography. But as one spends time with the images, it becomes clear that the camera here is less a machine for documentation and more a device for listening. The show moves away from the certainty traditionally associated with photography and instead embraces fragmentation, abstraction, and the instability of perception.

The exhibition’s title, “Stomata: Dr. Mahashe’s Open Frames,” is central to its philosophy. Gyamfi refuses closure. His photographs spill beyond their borders, suggesting that what is visible is only a fraction of a larger, more elusive reality.

Mirrors, layered exposures, shadows, and interruptions destabilize the image surface, producing photographs that feel suspended between memory, dream, and material fact. In Mirrored Interior – 9, repeating lines and fragmented pathways seem to stretch endlessly, creating an architectural maze that disorients the viewer and draws them deeper into the work. Indeed, space itself becomes uncertain.

What makes the exhibition compelling is the artist’s willingness to surrender control to chance. In works such as Mirrored Interior – 4 A & B, strategically positioned mirrors in front of cameras fracture and multiply the image, creating ghostly repetitions of the subjects.

These figures appear both present and absent at once, as though dissolving into the mechanics of the camera itself. The resulting photographs resist quick interpretation; they demand patience and prolonged looking.

Elsewhere, Gyamfi experiments with layered exposures and heat-manipulated imagery. In Mirage Test – Image M7 I & II, repeated exposures create dense visual textures that resemble hallucinations or fading memories.

Meanwhile, Plants & Heat – Untitled 12 & 13 pushes color and contrast to heightened extremes, producing images that vibrate with near-psychedelic intensity. Yet even at their most experimental, the photographs retain an emotional intimacy.

The exhibition succeeds by treating photography not as a finished product but as a living process of discovery. Gyamfi’s practice embraces uncertainty, improvisation, and what the synopsis calls “deep listening.” Rather than offering polished certainties, the artist invites viewers into moments of searching, hesitation, and wonder.

In an era dominated by instant digital images and endless visual consumption, “Stomata: Dr. Mahashe’s Open Frames” feels refreshingly meditative. It invites audiences to slow down and reconsider how photographs are made, how they behave, and how they might carry traces of the unseen. The result is an exhibition rich in curiosity, experimentation, and poetic depth.

The works in this show are selections from a larger project commissioned for the 59^th Carnegie International, which is concurrently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (USA). It includes behind-the-scenes footage, journal entries, and additional work that is not included in the Carnegie show.

It felt crucial to present the work here in the context of its production. This presentation at FCA-Ghana foregrounds the rigorous technical aspects of the project and balances them with its poetic attributes, making it fitting for the space that supports process-based contemporary art practices.

Curated with abbey it-a, it ends on Saturday, June 20, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Nubuke Foundation is currently hosting Ghanaian artist Dr. Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, who transforms fabric, fiber, and found materials into an immersive meditation on identity and the politics of space.

Indeed, her latest solo exhibition, curated by N’Goné Fall, unfolds less like a conventional gallery display and more like a breathing organism, expanding and contracting through texture, symbolism, and movement.

Spread across nine interconnected works, the exhibition draws visitors into a tactile world built from recycled textiles, jute ropes, pandanus mats, kapok, and used handbags. Undeniably, Amenuke’s use of discarded and organic materials is not merely aesthetic.

These objects serve as repositories of lived experience, carrying traces of personal histories and collective memory. In her hands, reused fabrics become living archives that collapse distinctions among past and present, public and private, and individual and communal.

Among the most compelling works is the “Scroll” series, in which Amenuke explores language, communication, and coded systems of knowledge. Twisted jute ropes stitched onto hanging surfaces resemble ancient scripts or cryptic glyphs, suspended between the familiar and the unknowable.

The references to hieroglyphics and other symbolic writing systems lend the pieces an archaeological aura, as if viewers were encountering fragments of a forgotten civilization. Yet the works resist direct translation, preserving mystery as an essential part of their power.

Elsewhere, “The Strength Within” confronts gendered expectations and the invisible pressures placed on women in both traditional and modern societies. Constructed from macramé knots, ropes, and used handbags, the installation transforms everyday materials associated with femininity into a powerful commentary on resilience, confinement, and self-determination.

The exhibition reaches its most ambitious scale in “Habitation Variations” – two sprawling installations that dominate the gallery space with an almost unsettling presence. Here, Amenuke investigates borders, migration, territorial control, and the slow infiltration of one system into another.

The installations appear parasitic yet organic, spreading across walls and floors as if alive. Depending on one’s vantage point, forms merge and mutate into unfamiliar entities, creating a sense of instability that mirrors contemporary anxieties about displacement and contested spaces.

Amenuke’s exhibition succeeds by balancing conceptual depth with emotional resonance. Her materials speak softly yet insistently, reminding viewers that identity, history, and belonging are never fixed. She offers not merely objects to observe but environments to inhabit and reflect in.

Titled “Dreaming is a Map”, the exhibition ends on Saturday, May 30, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

In the restless visual economy of Accra, where billboards compete endlessly for attention with political slogans, telecom campaigns, and consumer fantasies, Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku interrupts the city’s advertising rhythm with something far more reflective.

His public installation project, Baleboards, transforms discarded secondhand clothing into monumental urban gestures, draped across billboard structures that typically serve as platforms for commerce and persuasion.

Indeed, the rise of fast fashion has had a deeply damaging impact on the environment, driven by the mass production of cheap clothing designed for short-term use and rapid disposal. The industry consumes enormous amounts of water, energy, and raw materials, while textile factories release harmful chemicals and dyes into rivers and ecosystems.

Synthetic fabrics such as polyester also contribute significantly to microplastic pollution, with tiny plastic fibers entering oceans during washing. In addition, the constant demand for new trends encourages excessive consumption, leading to mountains of discarded clothing in landfills, where many garments take decades to decompose.

Tieku’s intervention is simple in material yet powerful in implication. Using bale clothes — the secondhand garments imported into Ghana in overwhelming quantities — Tieku repositions what is often dismissed as economic residue at the center of public discourse. The result is an exhibition that feels less like decoration and more like a confrontation with the realities of consumption, identity, and global exchange.

Installed high above Accra’s streets, the works immediately alter the city’s visual atmosphere. Instead of polished advertisements promising aspiration, viewers encounter hanging fabrics that carry traces of anonymous lives, migration routes, and economic inequalities. The clothes appear almost ghostly against the urban skyline, fluttering with a quiet insistence that resists the loud certainty of commercial branding.

What makes Baleboards compelling is its ability to merge sculpture, activism, and street intervention without becoming overly didactic. Tieku does not merely criticize the secondhand clothing economy; he also acknowledges its integration into everyday Ghanaian life.

Undeniably, bale clothes are deeply woven into local markets, fashion cultures, and survival economies. By elevating them onto billboard structures, he reframes them as a burden, an archive, and a symbol of resilience.

The scale of the installations is central to their impact. Billboards are traditionally spaces of authority and visibility, designed to dominate public attention. Tieku effectively hijacks that language, turning advertising infrastructure into a site for reflection. In doing so, he questions who gets to occupy public space and which stories deserve amplification in the urban environment.

There is also a poetic tension in the works. The garments, stripped of their original owners, become suspended identities — fragments of global movement that hang over the city like unfinished narratives. Passersby are compelled to look upward, not toward consumer desire but toward histories of circulation, labor, and cultural dependency.

With Baleboards, Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku shows how public art can disrupt routine perception and prompt collective introspection. In a city saturated with commercial imagery, his installations reclaim visibility for overlooked materials and conversations, transforming Accra into an open-air site of cultural inquiry.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Works by Ghanaian artist Ewuresi Archer, currently on show at Berj Gallery in Accra, resist easy reading, opting instead for a layered, restless visual language that mirrors the anxieties of contemporary life.

Indeed, her practice is marked by an intuitive, almost feverish energy. Writing seeps into the compositions not as explanatory text but as fragments—interruptions that drift across the surface like fleeting thoughts.

Her brushstrokes carry urgency, yet they are far from empty gestures. Each mark feels loaded, bearing the weight of emotion, critique, and a searching intellect. The works appear to think aloud, circling their subjects, doubling back, and resisting the comfort of coherence. In Archer’s hands, disorder becomes method.

What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is its refusal to aestheticize discomfort. Archer is not interested in simply representing emotion; she interrogates a reality dulled by familiarity. The works push against what might be described as the “soft violence” of normalization—the gradual acceptance of environmental degradation, neglect, and excess.

Plastic waste, nets, ropes, and synthetic debris are not incidental materials here; they are central to the narrative. By embedding them into her canvases, Archer denies viewers the luxury of detachment. The refuse we overlook is made insistently visible.

Materiality plays a crucial role in this visual language. Batik fabrics serve as her ground, layered with paint, chalk pastel, and yarn, creating surfaces that feel dense and tactile. These accumulations speak of both intimacy and overload, suggesting lives entangled in cycles of consumption and survival.

Her sculptural works extend this conversation into space: crocheted forms made from cut-up T-shirts and intertwined with found debris hang with a quiet tension, held together by fragments of discarded fishnet. They evoke fragility, improvisation, and a sense of precarious endurance.

There is beauty in Archer’s work, but it is never separate from what has been cast aside. Instead, it emerges through entanglement—through the uneasy coexistence of care and neglect, creation and ruin.

Curated by Nana Yaa Poku Asare Boadu, she offers no neat conclusions in this exhibition. What she provides instead is a sharp, poetic insistence that we look again at what we have learned to ignore—and reconsider the cost of calling it normal.

Titled “A Love Letter With Teeth”, the exhibition ends on Sunday, June 7, 2026.

By John Owoo

(Accra – Ghana)

Senegalese artist Caroline Gueye will present “Wurus,” an installation linking the celestial origin of gold to Senegal’s history, at the Senegalese pavilion during the 61^st edition of the Venice Biennale, which opens on Saturday, May 9, 2026.

Curated by Massamba Mbaye, the exhibition examines issues related to resources, memory, and the construction of gold’s value through a unique scientific and artistic approach – from the cosmic origin of gold to the mechanisms of perception, it brings together fundamental science and aesthetic experience.

In “Wurus” (gold in Wolof), Gueye creates an installation featuring works in polymer, bronze, and brass, prompting a contemporary reflection on resource extraction, environmental issues, and human rights, while also questioning notions of materiality and the perception of value.

Here, gold serves as a point of departure rather than the project’s subject: it enables the unfolding of historical, symbolic, and contemporary dimensions and invites a broader reflection on how the notion of value emerges.

Designed in dialogue with the venue’s architecture, the exhibition reconfigures the space as a perceptual journey in which some works appear through openings, while others are embedded in wall-based devices that engage the body and shift the conditions of perception.

Through these optical and perceptual effects, the artist displaces the question of value: it no longer resides in the object itself but in the gaze that constructs it. For the artist, art emerges from space itself: seeing becomes a physical experience, and the exhibition space becomes integral to the work.

Undeniably, her training in physics, particularly in astrophysics and atomic physics, does not define her practice; rather, it serves as a conceptual tool that supports autonomous artistic inquiry.

Gueye’s international background, enriched by studying Mandarin in China, informs a practice attentive to cultural circulation and to diverse ways of apprehending the world, and asserts a singular artistic approach at the intersection of science, cultures, and contemporary forms.

By John Owoo

(Lomé – Togo)

A mind-blowing discussion featuring academics – Dr. Anas Atakora and Dr. Patron Henekou – recently captivated an attentive audience at the Maison des Arts et du Social in Lomé, as part of a series titled “Carte Blanche”.

Coordinated by noocultures.info, the program, which is part of the Biennale of Public Space Arts in Togo’s OFF program, provided the audience with informative content that sparked questions and contributions from patrons.

Atakora and Henekou quickly set the tone for a fluid, almost intimate exchange. Their discussion, grounded in shared intellectual foundations, avoided oversimplification while making complex ideas accessible without diluting their depth. It struck a careful balance between rigor and openness.

Central to the encounter was a performative reading of excerpts from Atakora’s poems  En chair et en ville (Les Éditions de la Francophonie, 2025) and La vie que nous menons ici (Les Éditions Awoudy, 2023). These works outline a poetic universe in which the city is anything but passive. In Atakora’s writing, urban space exerts force—it imprints itself on bodies, imposes constraints, and shapes lived experience.

While such themes are not new to contemporary poetry, Atakora approaches them through a sensorial lens. His writing seeks less to describe the city than to make it physically felt, emphasizing that urban life is defined not only by infrastructure but also by intimate, personal experience. For him, “being a poet today is an urgency”—a call to slow down and restore depth to existence in environments that often flatten sensation and perception.

An underlying question lingers: is this sense of urgency unique to Atakora’s voice, or does it reflect a broader current in contemporary poetry? The discussion subtly invited the audience to consider this tension.

The exchange also ventured into more personal territory. Moving beyond theory, Atakora reflected on the foundational figures in his imagination—his mother, grandmother, and father—and on how they continue to shape his work. This perspective sheds light on his debut collection, Partir pour les mots (Les Éditions Awoudy, 2012), revealing a consistent trajectory of movement and displacement.

Undeniably, Atakora’s writing is defined by a dynamic interplay between here and elsewhere. This dual anchoring enriches his relationship with language and informs a body of work that continues to evolve. With eight publications to his name, he has established a solid literary path, and his frequent returns to Lomé signal a commitment to staying connected to his roots.

Beyond the strength of his texts, the event ultimately highlighted Atakora’s positioning as a poet whose work serves as a form of sensitive resistance—an attempt to confront and make sense of the rapid transformations of urban life.

By John Owoo

(Lomé – Togo)

Togo Jazz Festival is, without a doubt, one of West Africa’s most vibrant cultural gatherings, reaffirming Togo’s growing reputation as a hub for jazz and contemporary African music.

The 2026 edition (April 20–26) unfolded across Lomé and other cities in Togo, bringing together a diverse mix of local and international artists for a weeklong celebration of sound, culture, and creative exchange. 

Now in its 12th edition, the festival has become a major platform bridging jazz, African musical traditions, and global influences. Its programming typically reflects a deliberate fusion of genres—ranging from classic and contemporary jazz to Afrobeat, highlife, and experimental world music—positioning jazz not only as a genre but as a universal language shaped by African rhythms and diasporic connections.

The 2026 edition is described as having renewed ambition and an exceptional artistic lineup, continuing the festival’s commitment to showcasing both established names and emerging talent. Beyond performances, the event emphasized professional development, artistic collaboration, and networking opportunities for musicians and cultural practitioners.

A defining feature of the Togo Jazz Festival is its role in fostering intercultural dialogue. By inviting artists from across Africa and beyond, the festival becomes a meeting point where diverse musical traditions intersect, encouraging experimentation and cross-cultural collaborations. This spirit of exchange reinforces the festival’s broader mission: to celebrate creativity while strengthening cultural ties within the region and internationally.

Equally significant is the festival’s contribution to Togo’s cultural visibility. Over the years, it has helped position the country as a key destination on the African festival circuit, drawing audiences, industry professionals, and tourists. In doing so, it supports the local creative economy and highlights the richness of Togolese cultural heritage.

Ultimately, the 2026 Togo Jazz Festival is more than a series of concerts—it is an immersive cultural experience. Through its blend of music, education, and cultural exchange, it affirms jazz’s enduring relevance and celebrates Africa’s dynamic and evolving artistic landscape.