Arts and GH Heritage
From Kantamanto to the Gallery: Reclaiming Identity Through Textile Art
There is a quiet revolution in taking a word once used as an insult and turning it into a badge of imagination.
That transformation lies at the heart of KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures, where artist Kwabena Ofe Gideon Amponsah invites audiences to see wandering not as failure, but as a form of curiosity that shapes cities, identities, and creative expression.
In Ghana, “kubolor” has long described someone perceived as drifting without direction. Amponsah challenges that stereotype by presenting movement as an act of discovery.
His richly textured tufted works—created using a technique he taught himself after encountering it online—carry the marks of experimentation.
Thick layers of yarn, bold silhouettes, and tactile surfaces encourage viewers to slow down and consider the value of process as much as the finished artwork.
The exhibition draws much of its emotional power from Accra’s Kantamanto Market, one of the world’s largest second-hand clothing hubs.
Rather than treating discarded garments as waste, Amponsah transforms them into sculptures, wearable art, and immersive installations. Each fabric fragment carries traces of another life, suggesting that materials, like people, can find new purpose through reinvention.
That conversation extends into fashion through a collaboration with Ghanaian label DARKOS. The garments are not presented as merchandise but as living artworks, blurring the boundaries between clothing, sculpture, and performance.
Their contemporary forms encourage reflection on gender, identity, and the ways the body communicates personal history.
The exhibition’s installation mirrors the visual rhythm of Kantamanto itself. Hanging textiles, layered displays, and improvised arrangements recall the ingenuity of market traders, turning everyday merchandising techniques into a carefully orchestrated artistic language.
Visitors move through a space that feels at once familiar and theatrical, where commerce and creativity exist side by side.
Running until Monday, July 27, 2026, KUBOLOR: In Search of Greener Pastures leaves a lasting impression because it reframes a familiar Ghanaian expression with generosity and imagination.
It argues that the search for greener pastures is rarely about escape. More often, it is about resilience, reinvention, and the courage to keep moving until overlooked stories—and overlooked materials—find their place in the spotlight.
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.
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