Arts and GH Heritage
Dorothy Amenuke’s Art Turns Discarded Fabrics Into Living Memory
At first glance, the ropes look like tangled language. Thick strands of jute twist across suspended surfaces like unfinished sentences or symbols from a forgotten civilization.
Visitors entering Nubuke Foundation quickly realize that Dr. Dorothy Akpene Amenuke is less interested in decoration than in excavation.
Her exhibition, Dreaming is a Map, feels like walking through memory itself — unstable, layered, sometimes beautiful, sometimes unsettling.
In Ghanaian homes, fabric often carries biography. Old cloth is rarely discarded without thought. A mother’s wrapper, a market bag, a woven mat left in a corner for years — these objects absorb family histories quietly.
Amenuke understands that intimacy deeply. By using recycled textiles, used handbags, kapok, and pandanus mats, she transforms ordinary materials into vessels of cultural memory.
The exhibition’s emotional force lies in how familiar objects are stripped from their everyday function and reborn as political language.
In The Strength Within, handbags associated with femininity and domestic life become symbols of invisible labour, expectation, and survival.
Knotted ropes suggest both protection and restriction, reflecting pressures placed on women navigating tradition and modernity simultaneously.
Her sprawling Habitation Variations installations push the conversation outward. The works creep across walls and floors with organic unpredictability, evoking migration, contested borders, and the fragile idea of belonging in a world increasingly shaped by displacement.
Curated by N’Goné Fall, the exhibition avoids easy explanations. That ambiguity is part of its power. Amenuke invites viewers to sit inside uncertainty rather than escape it.
In a time when contemporary art often races toward spectacle, Dreaming is a Map achieves something quieter and more lasting: it makes discarded materials speak with emotional authority.
Every memorable art gallery begins with someone who believes a painting deserves more than a wall—it deserves an audience.
In Accra, that belief has shaped Berj Art Gallery into one of Ghana’s enduring champions of West African art.
Founded in 1996 by collector Joyce Quarshie, Berj emerged at a time when many Ghanaian artists were still searching for spaces that could connect their work with wider audiences.
More than three decades later, Quarshie’s commitment has grown into a gallery that celebrates both established masters and emerging voices under one roof.
A Living Story of West African Art
Walking through Berj feels less like entering a showroom and more like stepping into a conversation across generations.
Bold paintings share space with finely carved wooden sculptures, bronze works catch the light from different angles, and photographs add contemporary perspectives to centuries-old artistic traditions.
The gallery’s strength lies in that balance. Acclaimed painters stand alongside rising talents, creating a rare opportunity for visitors to see Ghana’s artistic evolution unfolding in real time.
It is a reminder that culture is not frozen in history; it continues to grow with every new brushstroke and every fresh creative voice.
More Than a Gallery
For international visitors exploring Accra, Berj offers something deeper than a sightseeing stop. It opens a window into Ghana’s creative identity, where craftsmanship, storytelling and heritage intersect.
As the gallery continues hosting exhibitions that bring together local and international artistic influences, it reinforces a simple but powerful truth: preserving culture is not only about protecting the past.
It is about creating spaces where the next generation of artists can imagine—and exhibit—the future.
A family photograph resting on a shelf may look like decoration. A half-finished piece of woven cloth may seem incomplete. A living room may simply be a place to sit.
At Nubuke Foundation in Accra, however, these familiar things are being asked to tell deeper stories.
Weight of the Ordinary, a group exhibition featuring Josiah Tsibu Manu, Priscilla Agbeti, Blanche Boni-Mississo, King David Osabutey (Kakalicka) and Sena Burgundy Appau, turns its attention to the overlooked details of daily life—and finds history hiding there.
Manu’s domestic interiors are particularly evocative. Furniture, photographs and household details become unofficial archives, recalling how Ghanaian homes often carry memories that never enter formal histories.
In Agbeti’s unfinished woven works, meanwhile, labour refuses to disappear behind polished craftsmanship.
The incomplete becomes deliberate, leaving viewers to consider the economic and social histories carried by textiles.
Elsewhere, Boni-Mississo examines how spaces determine who can move freely and who is kept at the margins. Kakalicka draws on Akan cosmology through his Ɔhɔhoɔ, or stranger, connecting questions of displacement and belonging with indigenous ideas.
Appau’s monumental blue figures turn inward, contemplating the uncertainty and possibility of becoming.
Together, the artists suggest that the everyday is not neutral. It is where memory is stored, identities are formed and social boundaries are experienced.
For audiences in Ghana and abroad, the exhibition offers an invitation to look again at what familiarity can conceal. Sometimes, the objects closest to us have the most to say.
Sometimes history survives not in monuments, but in memory. In Ghana, the beat of the atumpan once carried messages across kingdoms.
In Jamaica’s mist-covered Blue Mountains, that same language of rhythm became a weapon of survival.
Queen Nanny’s story begins in oral tradition, which holds that she was born among the Akan people before being captured during the transatlantic slave trade and forced to Jamaica.
What followed transformed her into one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated freedom fighters.
When the drum became a battlefield language
Leading the Windward Maroons, Nanny turned the rugged mountains into a fortress. British troops struggled against hidden trails, surprise attacks and a commander who understood that knowledge of the landscape could outweigh military strength.
Just as remarkable was her reported use of the atumpan, the Akan talking drum. What colonial forces dismissed as eerie sounds echoing through the hills became a coded communication system that helped coordinate resistance.
Years of failed campaigns eventually forced Britain to negotiate. The 1739 peace agreement with the Maroons remains one of the most striking acknowledgements that enslaved Africans had built a resistance too formidable to erase.
A bridge between Ghana and Jamaica
Today, Queen Nanny is Jamaica’s only female National Hero, and her portrait appears on the Jamaican $500 banknote.
Her legacy also reaches back across the Atlantic, reminding Ghanaians that culture can outlive displacement.
The rhythms that once echoed through Akan communities did not disappear at the coast.
They crossed an ocean, climbed a mountain, and became part of one of history’s most remarkable stories of resistance.
-
Ghana News1 day agoTop Headlines From Ghanaian Newspapers: Monday, Sept. 7, 2026
-
Sights and Sounds2 days agoTrade Accra’s Traffic for Treetops at Legon Botanical Gardens
-
Festivals & Events2 days agoDzawuwu: The Volta Festival That Celebrates Agave Bravery
-
Ghana News8 hours agoHow Ghana’s Government Pressured MTN, Telecel, and AirtelTigo to Cut Data Prices
-
Arts and GH Heritage13 hours agoThe Stories We Live With: Inside Nubuke Foundation’s Weight of the Ordinary
-
Ghana News9 hours agoTop Headlines From Ghanaian Newspapers: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026
-
Ghana News8 hours agoBuckingham Palace Responds to Jamaica’s $10 Billion Reparations Demand, But the UK Government’s Wallet Remains Shut
-
Health & Wellness2 days agoWhy 500 Sit-Ups a Day Won’t Reveal Your Abs