By John Owoo
(Accra – Ghana)
KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures, curated by Nuna Adisenu-Doe and Kwamena Boison and currently on view at the La Foundation for the Arts Gallery, transforms a familiar Ghanaian social label into an expansive meditation on movement, identity, and material transformation.
Rather than treating “kubolor” as a dismissive term for aimlessness, the artist Kwabena Ofe Gideon Amponsah reclaims it as a philosophy of exploration, resilience, and creative freedom. At the heart of the exhibition is Amponsah’s compelling use of tufting, a medium he taught himself after discovering the technique online. The resulting textile works have a tactile immediacy that invites close inspection.
Richly textured silhouettes, layered yarn compositions, and wearable forms reveal an artist fascinated by process as much as by product. The physical qualities of tufting—its ability to produce imagery on both sides of a fabric—serve as a subtle metaphor for duality, suggesting that identities, like textiles, are never confined to a single surface.
Equally significant is Amponsah’s engagement with discarded textiles from Accra’s renowned Kantamanto Market. These materials bear traces of their previous lives as they are reimagined as artworks, garments, and sculptural installations.
Their transformation reflects broader conversations about sustainability, consumption, and circular economies, while firmly grounding the exhibition in Ghana’s vibrant urban landscape. The artist demonstrates that waste is not an endpoint but the beginning of new aesthetic possibilities.
The collaboration with the fashion label DARKOS expands the exhibition beyond conventional gallery practice. Garments function not merely as clothing but as extensions of the artworks, dissolving distinctions among fashion, sculpture, and performance. Questions of gender, self-expression, and belonging are explored through contemporary silhouettes that prompt viewers to reconsider how the body becomes a vessel for storytelling.
Installation plays an equally important role. Inspired by the improvised display systems of Kantamanto’s traders and street hawkers, garments and textile works are suspended, layered, and assembled with an intentional informality.
The gallery echoes the marketplace’s organized chaos while evoking the theatricality of a fashion runway. This interplay between commerce and spectacle enriches the viewing experience, positioning everyday display methods as forms of artistic choreography.
KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures succeeds because it resists easy categorization. It is at once an exhibition about migration, sustainability, fashion, and identity, yet ultimately it is a celebration of creative adaptability. By elevating overlooked materials and reclaiming a culturally loaded identity, Amponsah presents wandering not as a sign of displacement but as a vital means of discovery.
It ends on Monday, July 27, 2026.
