Often in group exhibitions of contemporary art, especially in Western institutional contexts, curatorial practices tend to reduce the complexity of the artists’ individual works and visions to a common register, flattening diversity in favour of a homogeneous community idea. In Brescia, the exhibition Fragments of a World After Its Own Image at ApalazzoGallery, develops in a clear countertrend from a constellation of ideologies, practices and imaginaries in constant ferment. Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh’s curatorial approach emphasises the discontinuity and plurality of languages, reflecting the complex and intergenerational Ghanaian art scene.

Through two fundamental figures of 20th century photography, the exhibition offers the possibility of a historical, yet visionary look at the post-colonial transition. Felicia Abban, photojournalist and studio photographer, offers portraiture in which she investigates African self-representation with great visual awareness. James Barnor, pioneer of colour photography in Ghana and founder of the country’s first colour laboratory, is remembered for having immortalised the nation at the time of its independence. Among his shots, he documented the life of the African diaspora in London, capturing their cultural changes.

The exhibition continues with the work of several artists who grew up in the vibrant environment of Kumasi, a city marked by aesthetic experimentation and social change. Many of them are linked to the blaxTARLINES KUMASI collective. Founded by Kąrî’kạchä Seid’ōu in the 1990s, the collective promotes art as a means of emancipation, removing barriers between tradition and innovation and opposing Euro-Western models as universal. Fragments of a World After Its Own Image takes its title from a reflection by Marx and Engels on the process by which capitalism tends to homogenise the world, the same product that shaped colonialism. In response to this logic, the exhibition proposes an alternative vision, adopting fragmentation and instability as strategies of resistance. Moreover, the idea of art as a gift – central to blaxTARLINES’ thinking – challenges the centrality of the market, opening up a vision of art as a shared and participatory space. 

In the exhibition, the works of the twelve Ghanaian artists, engaged between identity, memory and collectivity, show the public fragmented visions of contemporaneity. Edward Prah combines materiality with the archive, questioning identity and collective consciousness through deterioration and regeneration. In Broken Images (2024-), he transfers familiar photographs onto aluminium composite panels, altering them with pigments, watercolours and black tea. The result is a blurred, textured surface that simulates the degradation of time, viewing the archive as an unstable and fleeting terrain. Dennis Ankamah Addo (Niiankama) develops a practice that combines painting, sculpture, film and installation. His work focuses on the ubiquity of objects and their ability to embody memories and hybridity. His works, often constructed from ordinary materials, invite us to rediscover the everyday as a poetic and historical space. Frane Akwasi Bediako explores the extension between technology, human beings and the environment in an idea of ‘amputation’ that she reworks and proposes in machines described as TRONS.

A large part of the exhibition is marked by painting, here understood as a large container of materials and thoughts. Ernestina Mansa Doku works with painting, video and sculpture, reinterpreting organic forms in a post-human approach. She acts on form with distortions, multiplications and reorganisations, changing its original appearance. Jeffrey Otoo develops a multidimensional practice that explores the complexity of human experience through a hybrid visual language. His works evoke a sense of fluid, cyclical temporality, drawing inspiration from symbolic silhouettes such as the medallion and using resin to create ethereal surfaces with shifting perspectives. Naomi Sakyi Jnr draws inspiration from the open-air markets of Ghana, transforming them into meaningful visual subjects. She focuses her attention on objects such as chevrons, crates and polypropylene plastic bags, rendering the market as a living space capable of reinventing itself. With this vision, she contrasts conventional representations linked to economic efficiency, revealing instead a vibrant and complex context that eludes unambiguous definitions. 

Samuel Baah Kortey, in his series Where We Belong (2025), interweaves narratives and colonial legacies of the Italian African diaspora with the aesthetics of combs and hairstyles to rewrite spaces of representation. The project reflects on hair care as a cultural and political practice, where everyday objects become vibrant archives of memory and resistance. Tegene Kunbi, an Ethiopian artist, creates abstract compositions in which geometric shapes and vibrant colours evoke landscapes. Through the use of oil and textures of Ethiopian textiles from religious rituals, he creates layered surfaces that weave harmony and tension. Colour becomes a spiritual and identity language for Kunbi, while the recurring structure of his paintings transforms the pictorial gesture into a constant ritual and struggle. Maame Adjoa Ohemeng creates surreal, fragmented worlds, populated by hybrid figures between the real and the virtual. Her works combine decorative materials and sculptural techniques on canvas, where even the frame becomes an active part of the narrative. Through disjointed textures and utopian visions, Ohemeng rejects linear structures, leaving room for imagination and ambiguity. Finally, Isshaq Ismail assimilates a tactile painting made of dense pastes, deformed figures and vibrant colours, in a style he defines as ‘semi-abstraction of childhood’. He reflects on the grotesque as an aesthetic and political form. His figures, constructed like sculptures, depict the suffering associated with contemporary social reality.  

In this interview, Ohene-Ayeh discusses the curatorial vision of the project, the crucial role of blaxTARLINES in the Ghanaian context and the choice of an aesthetic of discontinuity as a form of resistance and regeneration.

How does the exhibition Fragments of a World After Its Own Image embody your vision of curating as an empowerment tool, rather than as a mere esthetic selection?  

Personally, I approach curating as a medium; no different than the way an artist would use writing, photography, or painting, for example. Because of my training as a fine artist some twenty years ago in Ghana, I always curate with the mind of an artist. It is one way I can still practice art without being the artist. Then, as a member of blaxTARLINES KUMASI—who has been made to come to terms with curating as a way of responding to crises (intellectual, economic) and creating new possibilities out of such conditions—the implications of curatorship goes beyond selection. Curatorship, at the very least, deals with care, selection, display, and knowledge. These are some of things that inform Fragments of a World After Its Own Image, in terms of the diversity of works staged, the transgenerational temperature, and the way the works on show jettison uniformity. 

I would like to know what blaxTARLINES KUMASI represents for you.  What are its goals? How was it born?

More than a representation, blaxTARLINES is a paradigm operating on a fractal model of collectivism. It is also a contemporary art incubator based at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. Even more, we define it as an art labour movement inspired by key moments in emancipatory politics. The inaugural phase of blaxTARLINES was launched by the Ghanaian artist-philosopher Kąrî’kạchä Seid’ōu, whose Emancipatory Art Teaching project (2003-ongoing) became the vessel through which egalitarian ideas about art education begun to make inroads in KNUST. For instance, Seid’ōu’s “non-proprietary” pedagogical-curatorial-artistic project was meant to reveal the official, hidden, and missing curricular of the KNUST Painting programme, which was overdetermined by early modernist Eurocentric Beaux Arts and atelier norms. The latter had become entrenched in art education since the nineteenth-century missionary epoch, ossified during British colonial domination of the Gold Coast (colonial ancestor of Ghana) up until the dawn of this century. Over time, seid’ōu found accomplices in other teachers at the Department. Then the momentum grew to involve students, alumni, and other allies outside of the academy. These and the global economic system which maintains the divisions of “developed” and “under-developed” worlds constitute the crises from which it became necessary to create blaxTARLINES. Then in 2015, blaxTARLINES was formalized as a contemporary art institution in the Kumasi school. 

How do you imagine the future evolution of blaxTARLINES?

blaxTARLINES is the declaration that another possibility can be created even within a conservative system. The radical egalitarian verve of blaxTARLINES is to create conditions out of which people can emancipate themselves, should they desire to (this is where co-developing curriculums, public access art spaces, cultural platforms, residencies, studios, and so on become key strategies). The seid’ōuian pedagogical model is still instrumental here: which is to shift from the stultifying “assignment giving lecturer/assignment making student” model to the “guardian lecturer/self-conscious student” model. In this way, each willing participant decides how to implement or carry out its mode of politics along this line. They may also decide to abandon it altogether. 

L’ethos di blaxTARLINES è incarnare una nuova possibilità, un contrappunto, che trascende i canoni proprietari dell’arte in Ghana, di matrice modernista e postmodernista, con conseguenze globali. Questi canoni hanno fatto sembrare che non potesse esistere nulla di più sull’arte al di là del suo dualismo centro-periferia. blaxTARLINES è la dichiarazione che un’altra possibilità può essere creata anche all’interno di un sistema conservatore. Tuttavia, piuttosto che posizionarsi per dare libertà a qualcuno (cosa impossibile), la radicale verve egualitaria di blaxTARLINES è quella di creare condizioni da cui le persone possano emanciparsi, se lo desiderano (è qui che il co-sviluppo di curricula, spazi artistici ad accesso pubblico, piattaforme culturali, residenze, studi e così via diventano strategie chiave). Il modello pedagogico seid’ōuiano è ancora strumentale: si tratta di passare dall’ottuso modello “docente che dà incarichi/studente che fa incarichi” al modello “docente tutore/studente consapevole”. In questo modo, ogni partecipante volontario decide come implementare o portare avanti il proprio modo di fare politica su questa linea. Può anche decidere di abbandonarla del tutto. 

blaxTARLINES is often describes as a ‘silent revolution’ in art education in Ghana. Which aspects of this revolution you think are present or echoed in the works of the artists in the exhibition?

“Silent” is used here as a tactical and strategic descriptor. On the one hand, we owe it to the progressive Pan-Africanist Ayi Kwei Armah when he writes that: “The revolutionary, according to [Frantz] Fanon, inserts himself among his people, without noise. This formulation is pivotal, but because it is so casually understated, its myriad implications escape casual readers. [Amilcar] Cabral adds that in the revolutionary process, the desire for visibility is a teething disease, and that massive crowds, gathered together to make insurrectionary yearnings before the oppressor, make no sense. Quiet, selective, effective, efficient initiatives do make sense. Cabral is on ancestral ground here: the meliorative secret society is nothing new in Africa.”[2]

Silence is used in the ominous context of fugitivity (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney are kin here), as we needed to embed ourselves in the ultra-conservative environment of the university, to affect it enough for it to work counterintuitively. They are, of course, useful. But in our case, inserting ourselves “without noise” in the university system was the most strategic way to trigger generational change. This also accounts for why some progenitors of blaxTARLINES needed to evolve their studio art practices in order to occupy positions in the bureaucratic-technocratic structures of the university to be able to effect lasting curricular changes. All the artists in the exhibition, except James Barnor, Felicia Abban, and Tegene Kunbi, have been directly shaped by these politics. Abban (1936-2024) and Barnor (b.1936) although shaped by different generational concerns have demonstrated considerable trust in me and colleagues of my generation enough to work with us. This trust and allyship is also exhibited by Kunbi (b. 1980), who is an Ethiopian artist based in Berlin, Germany. For me, this is a good place to begin. 

Can you explain better the Seid’ōu’ concept of “transforming art from the status of commodity to gift”  

KOA: This aphorism recognises art as part of the commons of humanity. It is the guiding axiom of blaxTARLINES which was initially theorised by seid’ōu to encapsulate the spirit of his teaching project. First, it is a position that advocates for the subversion of the spurious, yet prevalent, idea that the market is the destiny for all art. The art market constitutes one institution (which, by the way, has a right of existence) but an overreliance on its centrality entrenches  class segregations which only work to perpetuate inequality and exploitation. Second, the “gift” economy, for seid’ōu, is, at its core, what he terms “non-reciprocal gifting,” based on the logic of radical sharing, which defies the laws of privatisation, capital accumulation, and gentrification. Pedagogy became an artistic form for him. Everybody in the encounter, rather than lose anything, gains more by this mode of sharing as long as they participate in the situation willingly. Furthermore, Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito has summarized this in his own way by suggesting that rather than the prevailing capitalist commodification of everyday life—where we pay to access goods/services/experiences even (or perhaps, especially) when they are essential to our existence—we could explore a shift to “commonification,” which is a logic that opens up to the commons (i.e. the shared cultural and natural resources which ought to be accessible to all of humanity), emphasizing use values over exchange values, and creating inclusive economic structures.  

How is the title Fragments of a World After Its Own Image reflected in the artistic practices presented? How do artists use the ‘fragmentation’ concept?

Here, I make reference to Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) where they critique capitalist universalism as a construct of bourgeois hegemony designed to “create a world after its own image”. This totalistic, standardized, and uniform globalized world market system can only fuel imperialism and colonialism. One of the main arguments of the exhibition is to interrogate this false universalism, seeking instead to articulate a radical inclusivity that privileges no singular center in the affirmation of preemptive equality. Therefore “fragments” highlights the immanent sublation of this false totality and despotism, by coming to terms with its unstableness. (Just like how advocates of blaxTARLINES infiltrated the bureaucratic system that was meant to dispossess so as to create a new way out of it). Therefore, if “a world after its own image” is formalistic, predetermined, closed, and bounded, then “fragments of a world after its own image” can be thought of as engaging the repressed excesses of such dogmatic canons. The arbitrary exclusion of such surpluses does not mean they are absent. The artists in the exhibition generally work with this attitude with regard to established forms, materials, styles, genres, and so on. 

Felicia Abban and James Barnor are fundamental figures in African photography: how do their works interact with younger artists ones?

One point I would like to make here is that for blaxTARLINES, exhibition making is another way of canonizing figures who have been left out of the extant, mainstream, discourses on art—in art schools and other avenues of knowledge production. 

Abban’s and Barnor’s practices offer us a way of building intergenerational dialogues, and provide a palpable way of interrogating the evolution of lens-based practices in terms of the materials, technologies, and histories and how artists choose to appropriate them today. Their practices span studio portraiture, commercial photography, photojournalism, and nature photography. Whereas practictioners like Naomi Boahema (1999) a Sakyi Jnr. and Edward Prah (1997-) employ it as a means, register, and technique towards their anti-narrative tableaux. 

What kind of dialogue you were hoping to create between the works in the exhibition and the public?

As this is my first exhibition project in Italy I did not have any specific expectations regarding the public there. I only hoped that they would be wiling to go through this experience with me, the artists, and the works on display. As for the selection of works, I already knew each artist and I looked forward to what the exhibition would do in terms of the unintended relations that would form. The historic 16th century Palazzo Cigola Fenarolli, where APALAZZOGALLERY is homed, also augmented the entire experience in ways I could not have anticipated with its ornate walls, columns, and ceilings. 

Is there any upcoming exhibition you are working on?

Yes, I am working towards the second chapter of this exhibition which will open next year. For now, I am back in in Kumasi where I teach at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST.  About the artist, I know that they are always working (even for Barnor who is in retirement), and therefore I look forward to growing together.  

Trnslation by Luigina D’Introno

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^[1] main art department of Ghana

[2] See Armah, Ayi Kwei. 1984. “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-a-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis.” Présence Africaine 3 (131): 35–65. 

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Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Ph.D., is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is a key member of the blaxTARLINES coalition. His curatorial work and criticism often explore themes related to emancipatory politics, and the intersection between curatorship and pedagogy. He is a teacher at the Department of Painting & Sculpture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi. Ohene-Ayeh’s curatorial projects include Fragments of A World After Its Own Image (2025) at APALAZZOGALLERY in Brescia, Italy; TRANSFER(S), Ibrahim Mahama’s solo exhibition in Germany and Ghana in 2023; Ghana 1957: Art After Independence (2024-2025) in Accra, Ghana; the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography (2019-2020); Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (A Retrospective of Agyeman Ossei ‘Dota’) (2020-2021) in Tamale, Ghana; Orderly Disorderly (2017) organized by blaxTARLINES in Accra; and the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale as a member of Exit Frame Collective (2023-2024) in Slovenia. His edited publications include TRANSFER(S) (2024), Mahama’s recent monograph published by Distanz, and From the void came gifts of the cosmos: a reader (2023) the official reader for the 35^th Ljubljana Biennial. Ohene-Ayeh’s published essays have featured in ArtReview, E-flux Architecture, African Arts Journal, and several others.