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.
