There is a particular soundscape to Accra that rarely makes it into official archives: the bargaining cries at Makola, the impatient horns trapped in traffic at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, the distant rhythm of roadside preachers competing with passing trotro mates. In the paintings of Ghanaian artist Seth Clottey, those sounds seem almost visible.

“With Seth, you can almost hear the noise of the market or the sound of the traffic in his painting,” one critic observed — perhaps the most accurate entry point into Journey Through Life, an exhibition less concerned with spectacle than with memory.

Clottey’s work functions like an urban diary of contemporary Ghana. His canvases move between crowded marketplaces, quiet beaches, dense city streets, and the emotional geography of ghetto communities often excluded from polished narratives about African modernity.

Rather than romanticising hardship, he paints these spaces with intimacy and dignity, paying attention to ordinary gestures: women balancing goods at dawn, children weaving through alleyways, exhausted workers leaning into evening conversations.

What makes the exhibition compelling is its refusal to separate beauty from struggle. The beaches glow with calm, yet the city scenes pulse with tension and movement.

The paintings suggest a country constantly negotiating change — economically, socially, and architecturally — while everyday people continue to shape its rhythm.

In many ways, Journey Through Life becomes an act of preservation. As Accra rapidly transforms under the pressure of development and digital culture, Clottey captures the fragile textures of lived experience before they disappear.

His paintings are not simply images of Ghana; they are records of atmosphere, resilience, and human presence.

The first thing that confronts visitors inside Berj Gallery is not beauty in the traditional sense. It is tension. Scraps of fishnet hang beside layered batik.

Threads twist through painted surfaces. Fragments of text drift across canvases like unfinished thoughts overheard in the middle of a restless night.

In her exhibition A Love Letter With Teeth, Ghanaian artist Ewuresi Archer transforms discarded materials into emotional evidence of the times we live in.

Plastic waste, rope, yarn, synthetic fabric and debris are woven directly into the work, refusing to remain invisible. The effect is unsettling in the most deliberate way. Archer forces viewers to sit with the things modern life teaches people to ignore.

Across Accra, clogged gutters, abandoned sachet water plastics and frayed fishing nets have become so familiar that they barely interrupt daily life anymore.

Archer’s work challenges that numbness. Rather than presenting waste as environmental decoration or political symbolism, she treats it as part of the emotional architecture of contemporary existence — something tangled into memory, survival, and consumption itself.

The exhibition’s title captures that contradiction perfectly. There is affection in the work: care in the stitching, patience in the layering, softness in the fabric.

Yet there is also aggression. The surfaces feel crowded, interrupted, almost breathless. Her compositions do not offer viewers the comfort of clean resolution. They pulse with uncertainty.

Curated by Nana Yaa Poku Asare Boadu, the exhibition reflects a growing movement among younger African artists who are using material experimentation not simply for aesthetics, but as social language. In Archer’s hands, discarded objects become witnesses.

By the time visitors leave the gallery, the city outside may look slightly different — every plastic fragment, torn net and overlooked corner suddenly carrying a quieter, heavier meaning.

On most days in Accra, billboards sell aspiration. They tower above traffic with polished smiles, political promises, telecom bundles, and imported lifestyles.

But in Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku’s latest public art intervention, the city’s skyline carries something more unsettling: heaps of discarded clothing suspended where advertisements normally compete for attention.

The installation series, Baleboards, transforms secondhand garments into monumental public sculpture, using the visual language of advertising to question the afterlife of global consumption.

Hung high above the streets, the fabrics ripple in the Harmattan breeze like silent witnesses to a worldwide system of excess.

In Ghana, bale clothing is both a necessity and a contradiction. Markets such as Kantamanto in Accra thrive on imported secondhand fashion, feeding local economies and shaping urban style culture.

Yet the same trade also leaves behind mountains of textile waste, much of it unsellable, clogging drains, beaches, and landfills. Tieku’s work refuses to separate these realities.

What makes Baleboards especially striking is its refusal to moralise. The garments are not arranged as evidence in a courtroom but as living material with memory. A faded shirt or torn dress becomes an archive of invisible labour, migration, class, and desire. Elevated onto billboard structures, the clothes acquire an almost ceremonial presence.

There is deep symbolism in reclaiming advertising infrastructure for public reflection. Billboards are designed to command attention and shape aspiration. Tieku disrupts that machinery by replacing commercial fantasy with cultural residue.

The result is not simply environmental commentary. It is a portrait of Accra itself — layered, adaptive, overwhelmed, stylish, and entangled in the flows of global capitalism.

In a city saturated with visual noise, Baleboards achieves something rare: it makes people pause and look upward differently.