Kumasi-based art collective exhibit in Italy
- akadimag
- 15 hours ago
- 6 min read
A Kumasi-based art collective is showcasing the works of 12 artists that span different cultures, genres and generations at a free-to-access exhibition in northern Italy.
‘Fragments Of A World After Its Own Image’ is a multi-disciplinary exhibition at The ApalazzoGallery in Brescia - inspired by the ideology from a communist manifesto.
The exhibition features works predominantly by Ghanaian artists but not exclusively [Tegene Kunbi is an Addis Ababa and Berlin-based artist], and includes those with affiliations to blaxTARLINES KUMASI.
What is blaxTARLINES KUMASI?
blaxTARLINES KUMASI is a collective of teachers, artists and curators that was established in 2015 at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana. For the past three consecutive year, it has been named in the ArtReview’s Power 100 – a widely circulated annual index of influence in the contemporary artworld.
“It can be described as a collective that promotes radical inclusivity for all people,” Dr Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh - exhibition curator and a member of blaxTARLINES KUMASI - told AKADi Magazine.
“It is transcultural and transgenerational - working with people from across the globe and across generations that share the same values,” said Kwasi.
This is reflective of this current exhibition which includes art from figures including the late Felicia Abban, Ghana’s first female professional photographer, and award-winning nonagenarian photographer James Barnor, form part of the showcase.
According to Kwasi, who is also an alumus and lecturer at KNUST in the department of painting and sculpture, their work responds to the intergenerational conversations blaxTARLINES KUMASI is interested in showcasing.
"For us, exhibition making is always an avenue to intervene in the making of history. Through exhibition making, and through deep research, is we make up for what is not there in our mainstream knowledge to update and insert more.
The artists
“This is where people like James Barnor and Felicia Abban, who have practices dating back to the ‘50s, working with artists that were born in the 2000s intersect. By bridging such gaps, we want to see how the relationships between older generations and present generations speak to future generations.”
The roll call of artists are: the late Felicia Abban, Dennis Ankamah Addo, James Barnor, Afrane Akwasi Bediako, Ernestina Mansa Doku, Isshaq Ismail, Samuel Baah Kortey, Tegene Kunbi, Maame Adjoa Ohemeng, Jeffrey Otoo, Edward Prah, and Naomi Boahemaa Sakyi.
Their work covers the employment of traditional art techniques, such as using paint, pastels, digital drawing methods, mixed media, using Plaster of Paris, sculpture and the practice of working with interactive media including virtual and augmented reality.
Emancipation and inclusivity
Emancipatory politics and the promotion of inclusivity in art are two key areas that blaxTARLINES KUMASI focusses on.
“During the colonial era [in the Gold Coast], there were certain things that were bracketed out of what was to be defined as art - such as indigenous attitudes and modes of working,” said Kwasi.
“And so even when indigenous practices were taught, they were taught from a paternalistic point of view. They were taught to be subjugated through Euro-western styles and conventions.”
“Unfortunately, imperialist politics have shaped a lot of our history so blaxTARLINES became a necessary invitation to be able to contest that.
“The whole point is to understand the contextual basis of what we had inherited as art [from the British] and push it beyond these horizons.”
Changing the narrative
The ideas that birthed the collective were formed by artist-intellectual Professor kąrî’kạchä seid’ōu when he established his Emancipatory Art Teaching Project at the KNUST in 2003, Kwasi explained.
Prior to meeting Professor seid’ōu, Kwasi explained that his perspective of art was based on particular forms and genres that was influenced by the West and colonialism. So, Ghana’s art canon was influenced by genres including renaissance formalism, early modernism, abstract and cubism. “Colonialism was the apparatus used to force a world view and social system on what art was,” he said.
“But my encounter with seid’ōu opened me up to the many possibilities that art could take - that it could be about the set conventions, but it could also be about more than that.”
Indigenous art
Kwasi points to the work of Ghana’s female muralists as one example.
“When you take places like Sirigu [a town in the Upper East Region of Ghana], women muralists who were working there have so many layers to their practice – it is performative, they use music and other things. It is not exclusively pictorial - there is an architectural dimension to all of this. We were interested in digging back into those indigenous practices.”
The exhibition
Encouraging different expressions of art is at the heart of the exhibition ‘Fragments Of A World After Its Own Image’.
The exhibition’s title is inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ political paper: The Communist Manifesto (1848).
“In the text, they [Marx and Engels] critique the bourgeois hegemony as one that is designed to create a world after its own image - a contrived version of universality where everything is linked with money and power.
“And so, by giving the exhibition the title: ‘Fragments Of A World In Its Own Image’, we are fragmenting it [the world] in a way that it will become more inclusive and allows for more than just the contrivance of money and power,” Kwasi told AKADi Magazine.
One of the aims of the exhibition is to encourage visitors “to engage the image as the thing that emerges out of production, distribution and consumption – entangled in everyday life (adverts, literature, poetry),” said Kwasi. “The aim is to look at how we respond to this multifaceted scope of imaging today.”
Art in everyday life
This is something that he encourages his students at KNUST to do too.
“What we want to affirm is true multiplicity – where each artist can determine their destinies on their own terms - the conception of art, the tools, the apparatuses, the means, the processes would be determined as and when it is needed, not because someone else has designated themselves as saying this is how it ought to be.
“This is how we can create a space where each artist can proclaim what art means for them and have a legitimacy of practising, or always trying to affirm this egalitarian principle.”
At KNUST, students are encouraged to supplement their formal training in art by learning from people they meet in everyday life such as: “car mechanics, fridge repairers because you never really know where your inspiration or an idea could come from,” said Kwasi.
This widening of the scope of where art resides is reflected in the curriculum at KNUST and students can explore robotics, photography, performance as well as the more traditional forms such as sculpture and painting. “All of them are available because art cannot be contrived to the few - this is what we describe as the universality of art – infinite possibilities of expression.”
From commodity to gift
Another key value within blaxTARLINES KUMASI‘s ideologies is the value placed on art and the idea of transforming art from the status of commodity to gift.
Kwasi explained that according to Professor seid’ōu, there is an overdependence on using money to access essential experiences like art, which is problematic. “We wanted to explore alternative economies that were less dependent on money and were more about sharing ideas, resources.”
In doing so, this move also promotes a more inclusionary approach to the accessibility of art – something that he believes has been gaining ground in Ghana over the last 20 years.”
“We are working to open up a different economy of exhibition-making that is not based on elitist models. An exhibition can be in an auto-mechanic's shop, on the street, or in a trotro.”
He explained that although commercial systems have a right to exist: “we are not saying that we want to make everything free or strip it of its financial value,” he does make the point that the older system of exhibition-making was not tolerant to generating alternative forms of value beyond the commercial value. And the commercial value is usually claimed by the elite, the diasporans, or rich people.
Kwasi points to award-winning artist Ibrahim Mahama as a prime example of where an alternative way that decommercialises the value of art is working.
“With Ibrahim’s spaces [Red Clay and Savannah Centre of Contemporary Art (SCCA) Tamale], there has been such a heavy financial investment and yet it is absolutely free to visit to anyone from all walks of life,” said Kwasi. “He creates an experience that everybody has a right to participate in.”
‘Fragments Of A World After Its Own Image’ runs from 29 March to 17 May 2025 at the ApalazzoGallery, and is collaboratively curated by Kwasi Ohene Aryeh, and curatorial assistants Maria Olivia Nakato and Zitoni Kayonga Tristan Tani.
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