Nana Oforiatta Ayim — curator, writer, art historian — opens her tour at Black Star Square, the independence monument on the Atlantic seafront, and plants one question in every studio she enters: what does it mean to make art, and a future, on ground still scarred by empire, slavery, colonialism and the violent work of nation-building. She lays the history bare. Trade here began inland with the forest kingdoms, then cracked open to Portuguese, British, Dutch, Swedish and Danish arrivals — commerce that curdled into the transatlantic slave trade.
Jamestown opens the route — one of Accra's oldest quarters, home of the Ga people. Corrugated rooftops, laundry strung between buildings, hand-painted signage, the neighborhood name lettered bold on a wall: a texture of daily resourcefulness Ayim keeps returning to. In Accra, creativity escapes the gallery. It rides minibus panels, carves itself into coffins, dresses a person for the street.
Artist 01 · Multimedia
Kwasi Darko
One Way Vision — car doors, photography, augmented reality
Salvaged automotive panels and paint fill Darko's workspace. One Way Vision reclaims car doors as canvases, pulling its charge from the trotro — Accra's privately-owned minibuses. "Trotro" traces to the Ga word for three pence, a bus fare from the era of the British West African pound. Their owners letter them by hand with "one-way" stickers: proverbs, social commentary, political bite.
On the composition
Darko reads the street as a gallery. He worked the local trotro station with camera and phone, harvesting the visual field, then buried augmented-reality QR codes in the painted panels — static images that wake into video once a viewer steps close. A car door becomes readymade and screen at once, built to be circled rather than glanced at. A portrait shoot near his home closes the visit: his patterned clothing, greens and browns, tuned to the surfaces behind him, folding maker, subject and ground into one frame.
"There's art all around, even though we don't notice it."
readymade
augmented reality
street vernacular
photography
References
Artist 02 · Sculpture / Carpentry
Paa Joe
Figurative "fantasy" coffins — abebuu adekai, the proverb boxes of the Ga
Joseph Tetteh-Ashong, born 1947 and known as Paa Joe, ranks among Ghana's foremost coffin sculptors. He apprenticed under Seth Kane Kwei, who originated the form in the 1950s when a cocoa-pod palanquin built for a chief became his coffin after the chief died suddenly. The Ga name these works abebuu adekai — "proverb boxes."
On the composition
Every coffin encodes a life in wood — a profession, a clan totem, an aphorism made solid. Brightly-painted caskets crowd the workshop: a fish for a fisherman, a Coca-Cola bottle for a bottling-company executive, a cockerel held back for "an important man" of the Nungua, a reptile bound for a collector in Los Angeles. Ga belief grounds it — life continues in the next world as it ran in this one, and an exclusive coffin marks the standing of the dead. Each one surfaces only on burial day, funerary and fleeting, then vanishes into the earth.
"I didn't walk around to show off and for people to praise me for my work. That's not who I am."
figurative sculpture
Ga tradition
funerary art
non-verbal language
References
Artist 03 · Painting
Kofi Agorsor
Textured abstraction, an African Cubism — painter, sculptor, musician
Kofi Agorsor, born 1970 near Akatsi in the Volta region, abandoned architecture for paint and earned his diploma from Accra's Ankle College of Art in 1993. Painter, sculptor, musician — he works at Bach's Art Studio in heavily textured abstraction. Eight years went into the method: paint layered three and four deep, a build he measures against Van Gogh and Rembrandt.
On the composition
Agorsor builds his surface rather than paints it — texture turns structural, three or four layers worked into a single canvas. He seizes Cubism and claims it as an African, riding its freedom to fracture form "without boundaries." His politics sit on the surface: police brutality, the "Fix the Country" protests against hardship, the recurring violence against Ghanaian women. A writer wields the pen; he wields the brush. He hands Ayim charcoal — oil pastel, mixed mediums, music in the room — and they sketch a mother and child together, a study he later resolves into the finished canvas that ends the route.
"A writer will use his pen, but I think my brush is my gift."
textured impasto
African cubism
political painting
mixed media
References
Artist 04 · Digital / New Media
Afroscope (Nana Opoku)
Machine learning, VR, and a drawing robot trained on àṣẹ
Under the name Afroscope, Nana Opoku builds futuristic digital work that stares inward and backward at once. Ayim chose him for the Ghana Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale — Black Star: The Museum as Freedom, shown beside Na Chainkua Reindorf and Diego Araúja. He lives in Tema, an hour outside Accra.
On the composition
Afroscope calls his process intuitive, experimental, spontaneous — ink on paper first, then the digital sphere, then VR. Headsets and 3D imagery surround a robotic arm he trained to draw in his own hand. He scanned 1,024 of his own illustrations and fed them through a machine-learning algorithm, raising an installation that interrogates whether a computer can be an artist — whether it can hold "spiritual intelligence." His conceptual bedrock is the Yoruba term àṣẹ: the invisible life force binding everything, animating everything. His "archaeological digging" excavates knowledge systems, mythologies and cosmologies erased or whitewashed from formal schooling, then re-voices them through new machines.
"Can you say a computer has spiritual intelligence?"
machine learning
virtual reality
generative drawing
àṣẹ / cosmology
References
Artist 05 · Performance
Elisabeth Efua Sutherland
Weaving in the Wild — aerial silks, dance-theatre, and the textile tradition of Ghana
Sutherland dances, choreographs, writes and directs from Accra, carrying a BA in Theatre from DePauw and an MA in Performance from Brunel. She founded Terra Alta, an Accra performance hub, in 2017. Weaving in the Wild fuses aerial silks, dance-theatre and a thread of physical theatre to probe Ghana's weaving heritage.
On the composition
Sutherland engineered it to travel — she will stage it in the weaving communities of the Volta region, before the people who make the cloth, so performance and subject breathe the same room. She drives her own body into kente weaving, a craft long reserved for men, contesting that gendering from inside the loom rather than outside it. She aims to bind young people to their culture through movement — "we, as Africans, we default to dance." The silk doubles as apparatus and woven thread, the dancer crossing it the way a shuttle crosses a warp.
"We, as Africans, we default to dance."
performance
aerial silks
kente / textile
gender & tradition
References
Themes that run through
Everything is artAyim's spine: creativity lives on minibus panels, in coffin shapes, in how a person dresses. Darko and Paa Joe build straight from this premise.
Inheritance & the futureEvery studio stands against the weight of slavery and colonialism, against the open question of a Ghanaian future. Stated as thesis at the start, answered at the shore.
Reclaiming formsAgorsor seizes Cubism "as an African." Afroscope resurrects erased knowledge through machine learning. Sutherland drives a woman's body into a male weaving craft.
Non-verbal languagePaa Joe's coffins, Darko's one-way stickers, Sutherland's choreography, Afroscope's àṣẹ — meaning carried without a single word spoken.
The curator & the institutions
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and art historian based in Accra, founder and director of the ANO Institute of Contemporary Art and creative director of Gallery 1957. She serves as Ghana's commissioner for restitution — responsible for strategies to return looted art — and curated Ghana's first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 (Ghana Freedom, named for Kwame Nkrumah's declaration that the country is free forever) as well as the 2022 follow-up.
The route threads Accra's web of spaces: the Arts Centre market; Gallery 1957, founded 2016 by Marwan Zakhem inside the five-star Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast, where Agorsor showed; and the Artists Alliance Gallery on Labadi beach, founded by veteran painter Professor Ablade Glover, holding historical and modern work side by side. Ayim mines them for research and inspiration between studios.
The close
The route closes where it opened — at the sea. Inside Kofi Agorsor's studio, the mother-and-child sketch has resolved into a finished canvas. Ayim then walks back to the Atlantic shore, "the place that, for better or worse, connects us with the rest of the world." The water that carried the slave trade outward now carries Accra's artists into a global conversation they are bending to their own ends.
On sourcing. Built from an automated transcript (OpenAI Whisper) and frame-by-frame visual analysis (AMD Instella-VL-1B, 362 frames), then corrected and expanded through web research. Names and biography stand verified against gallery profiles, Venice Biennale records, museum collections and DW's own credits — Whisper's phonetic guesses ("Kwasi/Kwesi Darko," "Kofi Awuya," "Nana Ofriata Ayyum") corrected here. Composition notes track what appears on screen and what each artist states on camera; framing follows Ayim's narration.