Every conversation about galamsey seems to begin with the same image: a miner waist-deep in muddy water, an excavator tearing through a once-green landscape, or a river turned the colour of clay.

Ghanaian artist Ebenezer Christian wants us to look somewhere else entirely. His question is not who digs the pit, but who profits while remaining unseen.

In his 13-piece sculptural series, The Ambiguity of Mask, Christian transforms abandoned mining equipment, broken protective gear, and industrial debris into haunting faces that appear both familiar and anonymous.

They stare back at viewers with an unsettling silence, carrying the physical scars of extraction while refusing to identify the people behind them.

The masks are not portraits of miners alone. They are symbols of concealment, pointing to the financiers, traditional authorities, landowners, political actors, and other influential figures whose roles in Ghana’s illegal mining economy are often discussed in whispers rather than public debate.

One of the exhibition’s most thought-provoking works, We Know Within, suggests that the truth about galamsey has never been entirely hidden. Instead, it reflects a collective awareness that responsibility extends far beyond those operating machines at mining sites. The title itself hints at an uncomfortable reality: many know where accountability lies, yet meaningful action remains elusive.

Christian’s choice of recycled materials gives the sculptures unusual authority. Every rusted metal fragment and damaged helmet once belonged to the machinery of extraction. Rather than merely representing environmental destruction, the objects embody it. Their transformation into art becomes an act of reclamation, rescuing discarded remnants of exploitation and giving them a new purpose as witnesses.

This approach also places Christian within a growing movement of contemporary African artists who use found materials to address urgent public concerns. Across the continent, artists increasingly see waste not simply as refuse but as historical evidence—objects capable of preserving stories that official records sometimes overlook.

In Ghana, where polluted rivers, degraded forests, and disappearing farmlands have become defining consequences of illegal mining, The Ambiguity of Mask arrives with remarkable urgency.

Yet its greatest strength lies in resisting easy answers. Instead of assigning blame to those most visible, Christian asks audiences to examine the structures that make environmental destruction profitable in the first place.

His sculptures ultimately suggest that the greatest disguise in the galamsey crisis is not worn by the miner standing in plain sight. It belongs to the powerful figures who remain comfortably behind the mask, untouched by the devastation unfolding in the open.

Adam Tata Gasakor’s latest exhibition explores the invisible traces that shape identity long after moments have faded.

A painting can sometimes remember what people forget.

That quiet proposition sits at the heart of Echoes of Presence, the latest solo exhibition by Ghanaian contemporary artist Adam Tata Gasakor, where canvases become less about what is seen than what is felt.

Instead of offering recognizable faces or familiar landscapes, Gasakor asks viewers to search for fragments of themselves inside layers of colour, texture, and movement.

The approach reflects a growing shift within Ghana’s contemporary art scene. Increasingly, artists are moving beyond documenting everyday life to exploring the emotional terrain beneath it—memory, belonging, grief, resilience, and the relationships that continue to influence people long after encounters have ended.

For Ghanaian audiences, this idea resonates with cultural traditions that honour remembrance. Whether through storytelling, family lineage, festivals celebrating ancestors, or communal rituals that preserve collective history, memory has long been understood as something shared rather than private.

Gasakor translates that philosophy into abstraction, allowing emotion to carry the narrative instead of literal imagery.

His paintings reward patience. Thick applications of pigment and expressive brushstrokes create surfaces that appear to shift depending on where the viewer stands. No single interpretation dominates.

One visitor may recognise hope where another finds loss, proving that the artwork is completed as much by the audience as by the artist.

Presented at The Mix Design Gallery in Accra, the exhibition also reflects the confidence of a new generation of Ghanaian painters whose work speaks across borders without abandoning local sensibilities.

Their language is deeply personal, yet their themes—identity, memory and human connection—are universal.

In an era when visual culture often competes for attention through spectacle and speed, Echoes of Presence embraces silence instead. It suggests that some of life’s most enduring experiences cannot be photographed or fully explained.

They linger in memory, shaping choices, relationships and identity in ways that remain invisible but unmistakably real.

As the exhibition continues until August 4, 2026, Gasakor offers more than a collection of paintings. He creates a space where visitors can slow down, confront their own recollections, and discover that the most lasting presence is often the one that cannot be seen.

Artist Marianne Costade is using one of humanity’s oldest forms of expression to ensure an important part of Africa’s heritage is not forgotten.

The Franco-Senegalese and Congolese visual artist has spent the last several years documenting traditional African hairstyles, transforming them into what she describes as a living archive of Black memory (you can see her works here).

Through photography, performance, and self-portraiture, Costade is preserving centuries of cultural knowledge encoded in hair—knowledge that colonialism, slavery, and cultural assimilation often sought to erase.

Her work has attracted growing international attention for highlighting a truth frequently overlooked outside the African continent: for generations, hairstyles have served as a language of identity, resistance, spirituality, and community.

An Artist Who Calls Herself an “Archaeologist of Black Memory”

Costade refers to herself as an “archaeologist of Black memory,” a description that reflects the purpose behind her ongoing artistic project.

Since 2021, she has been systematically recreating traditional African hairstyles from different regions and ethnic groups, documenting each one through carefully composed photographs and artistic installations.

Rather than relying on historical illustrations or museum artifacts alone, Costade places herself at the center of the project, photographing her own body as both canvas and historical record.

Her self-documentation explores not only how these hairstyles looked, but also what they communicated.

Hairstyles That Tell Stories Across Continents

Among the styles Costade has recreated are the Yoruba Koroba hairstyle from present-day Nigeria, the Somala hairstyle associated with Madagascar, and intricate braided patterns inspired by so-called “map braids.”

According to longstanding oral histories, some enslaved Africans used braided cornrow patterns to symbolize escape routes, conceal pathways, or carry seeds that could sustain them during their search for freedom.

Whether marking social status, age, family lineage, spirituality, or acts of resistance, hairstyles often functioned as visual forms of communication long before written records documented many of these traditions.

Costade’s work seeks to recover those stories for contemporary audiences.

More Than Beauty

For Costade, hair is not simply a matter of fashion.

It is an archive.

Throughout African history, hairstyles have reflected cultural identity, celebrated important life milestones, and strengthened community bonds. Hair grooming itself has often been a communal ritual, with techniques and traditions passed from one generation to the next.

Her installations combine photography with live performance to recreate the intimacy of these practices, emphasizing that African hairstyling has always been deeply connected to care, belonging, and collective memory.

By placing these traditions inside galleries and cultural institutions, Costade invites audiences to view hairstyles with the same historical significance often reserved for paintings, manuscripts, or sculptures.

Preserving Heritage in an Era of Cultural Debate

Costade’s work arrives at a time when conversations about cultural identity, representation, and historical preservation are taking place across museums, universities, and public institutions worldwide.

As discussions continue over whose histories are documented—and whose are forgotten—her project offers a reminder that heritage exists in everyday practices as much as in written archives.

For many people of African descent, hairstyles have remained one of the most enduring links to ancestral traditions despite centuries of displacement and oppression.

Costade’s visual archive helps ensure those traditions remain visible for future generations.

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A Living Record of Black History

Through every braid, sculptural style, and carefully recreated design, Costade is preserving more than artistic techniques.

She is documenting stories of migration, resilience, survival, and identity that have traveled across continents and generations.

Her work challenges viewers to reconsider African hairstyles not simply as cultural expressions, but as historical documents in their own right.

In doing so, Marianne Costade is helping ensure that an essential chapter of African and Black history continues to be seen, remembered, and celebrated around the world.