There is a particular quality of light in Accra that never fully leaves you. For Gabriel Selassie Tsagli, a Ghanaian artist living between Accra and Berlin, it is this light—alongside the memory of a specific mother and a specific city—that anchors his first solo exhibition in his birthplace.

Son of Kafui at Gallery 1957 is a homecoming in the truest sense. The title itself is an intimacy: Kafui, meaning “love” or “son of God’s own,” was the name of Tsagli’s late mother.

Following his return to Accra in 2025, Tsagli has created a body of work that doesn’t merely depict grief but gives it form, movement, and colour.

The exhibition begins where all loss begins—in the body’s remembrance of place. Tsagli’s paintings emerge from lived experience rather than pre-imagined form.

He builds surfaces through accumulation, layering, pressing, and scraping paint until figures appear “as though remembered rather than constructed”.

This is not figurative painting in the traditional sense; here, figuration and abstraction overlap, allowing bodies and faces to emerge and recede like recollections themselves.

Colour serves as a generative force. Orange suggests action and vitality, while blue becomes a space for reflection and articulation. Held in tension, these chromatic forces create an emotional architecture that resists closure, sustaining ambiguity across the works.

The figure of his mother recurs throughout, not as a portrait or a likeness, but as atmosphere, material trace, and presence suspended in the space between what is here and what is gone.

Curated by Marina Paulenka, the exhibition considers return not as resolution but as an ongoing negotiation.

Accra itself becomes a living presence, a shifting organism that evolves alongside the artist’s understanding of home—an understanding complicated by a life shaped by movement between Ghana and Germany.

What makes Son of Kafui remarkable is its refusal to resolve grief. Instead, Tsagli invites us to remain with what resists closure, to encounter meaning as it unfolds.

In doing so, he transforms personal loss into a broader reflection on how we carry people, places, and histories within us. The exhibition runs at Gallery 1957 until 12 September 2026.

A constellation is never just about the stars. It is about the lines we imagine between them.

That idea sits quietly at the heart of Nsoromma, a group exhibition at The Mix Art Gallery bringing together five participants from the Rising Star 2026 cohort: Albert Nii Nortey Dowuona, Baaba Sarpong, Christabel Dzandu, Paul Leslie Ahadji and Emmanuel Tetteh.

Named after the Akan word for “children of the stars,” Nsoromma takes celestial imagery beyond decoration.

Here, the night sky becomes a way of asking an older Ghanaian question: where do we come from, and what parts of that inheritance continue to shape who we become?

The exhibition’s significance lies partly in how these emerging artists approach cultural memory. Tradition does not appear as a sealed archive or an untouched inheritance.

It is something negotiated—carried through families, altered by migration, questioned through personal experience and reinterpreted by each generation.

Across painting, installation and mixed media, the artists explore ritual, spirituality, belonging and self-discovery.

Their works occupy the space between what is inherited and what is invented, reflecting a generation increasingly comfortable moving between Ghanaian cultural references and contemporary artistic languages.

That makes the constellation metaphor especially fitting. A single star can be striking, but its meaning changes when placed among others.

So it is with these five artistic voices: distinct in approach, yet connected by questions of identity and place.

Rather than offering definitive answers, Nsoromma asks visitors to “find their own cosmologies”—to look, interpret and perhaps recognise something of themselves in the spaces between the stars.

Presented as part of Accra Art Week, the exhibition runs until September 2, 2026.

Before privacy became a prized feature of modern housing, Ghanaian compounds offered something harder to design: a built-in community.

You did not need a WhatsApp group to know what was happening in a Ghanaian compound. You simply opened your door.

Someone was pounding fufu. Children were chasing a football between rooms. An auntie was calling a neighbour’s child by name. From somewhere above, a radio played highlife while a grandmother sat outside, watching the afternoon unfold.

The compound house was more than a place to live. It was an informal social network long before the phrase existed.

Where Everyone Looked Out for Everyone

Children often grew up surrounded not only by parents and siblings but by cousins, grandparents, tenants and neighbours who could all exercise a little authority. If you climbed a mango tree too high, an older person passing by could order you down—and that instruction carried weight. By the time you reached home, your parents probably already knew.

There was irritation, certainly. Privacy was limited, and family disagreements could become everyone’s business.

Yet the same closeness created a powerful safety net. A child always had another adult to turn to. Food could be shared. News travelled quickly. Births, funerals, festivals and everyday celebrations became collective experiences.

Modern housing has changed that rhythm. Gated communities, apartments and detached homes offer security, privacy and independence, but they can also create physical distance between households. Even families living under one roof may spend much of their day communicating through phones rather than across a shared courtyard.

What We Lost Along the Way

The compound house was never perfect, but it embodied an important Ghanaian idea: community was something you lived, not something you scheduled.

Perhaps the challenge today is not to recreate the old compound house exactly, but to recover its spirit—neighbours who know one another, children who can play together, and communities where someone notices when you have not been seen.

That may be a form of heritage worth preserving.