By John Owoo
(Accra – Ghana)
Grief can reshape one’s relationship with place. Familiar streets become repositories of memory, colors take on emotional weight, and the ordinary becomes charged with the presence of those no longer there. In Son of Kafui, Gabriel Selassie Tsagli transforms this intimate experience of loss into a compelling visual meditation on memory, belonging, and return.
Presented by Gallery 1957 and curated by Marina Paulenka, the exhibition marks Tsagli’s first solo presentation in Accra. It is also a homecoming of sorts for the Ghanaian artist, who lives and works between Accra and Berlin. Created after his return to Accra in 2025, the new body of paintings draws deeply on the emotional terrain of a city that is both his birthplace and a remembered landscape.
The title is especially revealing. Kafui, the name of Tsagli’s late mother, becomes more than a personal reference; it provides the exhibition’s emotional foundation. Through her memory, the artist explores inheritance, love, grief, and the complex transition from son to father.
Color is central to this exploration. Orange suggests movement and vitality, while blue introduces moments of contemplation and spaciousness. Yet Tsagli’s paintings resist a straightforward symbolic reading. Figuration and abstraction overlap, allowing bodies, faces, and fragments to emerge and recede like recollections. His mother appears not merely as a subject to be represented but as a recurring presence within an evolving emotional landscape.
Accra, meanwhile, becomes more than a backdrop. The city becomes a living presence, evolving alongside the artist’s understanding of home. This is especially significant for an artist whose life has been shaped by movement between Ghana and Germany. In Tsagli’s work, displacement does not necessarily entail rejecting place; instead, it complicates belonging, making home something continually negotiated through memory.
His multidisciplinary practice—spanning painting, music, performance, video and movement—also informs the paintings’ rhythmic quality. They seem to function less as fixed narratives than as emotional spaces, inviting viewers to inhabit uncertainty, movement and remembrance.
Son of Kafui ultimately succeeds because it does not try to resolve grief. Instead, it gives grief color, form and movement. Tsagli turns personal loss into a broader reflection on how we carry people, places and histories within us. In doing so, the exhibition becomes both an intimate tribute to a mother and a thoughtful meditation on what it means to return home changed.
It ends on Saturday, September 12, 2026.
