By John Owoo
(Accra – Ghana)
An exhibition of works by 2024 Yaa Asantewa Art Prize winner Denyse Gawu-Mensah, which forms part of the Accra Culture Week, is currently on display at Gallery 1957 in Accra.
Rooted in a family archive spanning Ghana’s post-independence decades, the exhibition presents memory as both fragile and enduring, while exploring how personal histories reflect larger national narratives.
Through image transfer techniques and layered textiles, Gawu-Mensah transforms family photographs from the 1960s and 1970s into textured relics—objects that resist fading even as time wears them down.
The exhibition’s title, “Lightyears of Us,” draws from astronomy to explore the artist’s engagement with distance and time displacement. Just as sunlight takes eight minutes to reach us, her works with memories arrive refracted, altered, and filtered across generations.
This temporal gap acts as a metaphor for the archive itself: history is always glimpsed slightly out of sync with lived experience, illuminated by what survives and shadowed by what does not. Photography, which is foundational to her practice, functions as both a literal and symbolic conduit of light across time.
Curated by Angelica Litta Modignani, the exhibition unfolds in two parts. The first recreates elements of Ghanaian domestic interiors from the post-independence period. Here, wooden chairs, yellowed picture frames, a 1970s Brigade Journal, and simple household objects evoke the everyday atmosphere of middle-class Ghanaian life.
Undeniably, these carefully chosen items create an atmosphere that feels both lived-in and suspended, as if viewers are stepping into a preserved memory rather than a reconstructed scene.
A second room depicts the bedroom of a young Ghanaian man—aspirational, self-fashioning, and tuned to the cultural rhythms of the time. Hair products, a mirror, a neatly made bed, and other personal items suggest private rituals of becoming.
On the walls, Gawu-Mensah displays four pieces inspired by imagined highlife album covers and a fictional record label, Santrofi Sound Records. These fake records act as playful counter-archives, suggesting what could have been while honoring Ghana’s musical history’s creative energy.
Ultimately, “Lightyears of Us” is a deeply personal tribute to heritage and home. Gawu-Mensah invites viewers into the intimate spaces that shaped her, weaving together familial memory, national history, and speculative imagination. The result is a powerful meditation on how stories endure—sometimes clearly, sometimes as a faint afterglow—across the light years between past and present.
The exhibition concludes on Saturday, January 3, 2026.
