Following two iterations since November 2022, Gallery 1957 in Ghana has on show Unlimited III: The African Family, a group exhibition with 14 artists exhibiting work in the gallery’s brutalist 1400 square metre space. Artists Rita Mawuena Benissan, Yaw Owusu, Cornelius Annor, Amoako Boafo, Kwesi Botchway, Isshaq Ismail, Kofi Agorsor and Afia Prempeh are included in this exhibition. Also featured are the 93-year-old Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi; Gerald Chukwuma, Thania Petersen, Kelvin Haizel, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Jeremiah Quarshie. Founder Marwan Zakhem, who doubles as the curator of the Unlimited exhibition series, has seen the gallery consistently expand its focus on artists from Africa and the diaspora since its inauguration in 2016.
The exhibition explores how the family in African societies extends far beyond a nuclear unit. African family systems are known to be steeped in humanity, spirituality and philosophies. They are defined by agglomeration, instead of being reduced into their components. As Chinua Achebe would say, “We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
“I examine my own family archives and then my own country’s archives while thinking about accessibility,” Ghana-based artist Rita Mawuena Benissan states. The artist strives to find space for traditional experiences in contemporary settings, with the audience factored in. On display are five of her embroidered works—a selection from pieces born out of local collaborations over the past five years—with a royal embroiderer, a bamboo carver and a totem maker.
I examine my own family archives and then my own country’s archives while thinking about accessibility.
– Rita Mawuena Benissan, artist
“How do we preserve our culture? How are our stories being told? How are they being presented in different ways?” are the questions Benissan asks to make tapestries using archival images collected over time.
The vibrant tapestries depict the layout of local palaces, processions, funeral ceremonies and images of the youth who are protectors of the Ashanti kingdom stool, symbolic of unity. To Benissan, a family is a community embracing the chief, celebrating each other and their traditions.
Benissan shares with Thania Petersen the talent of transforming communal stories into tapestries that excavate histories and pay homage to tradition. Petersen’s tapestry and video works capture the multiplicity of being an African in a post-colonial and post-apartheid world. Cape Town’s ‘passion gap’ teeth modification is referenced – history has it that in communities of the Western Cape, slaves were deprived of their upper front teeth to tamper with the indigenous language of clicking sounds. With time, slaves would intentionally extract their teeth to take back control of their bodies.
“A lot of the time, my work starts with some kind of performance,” says Petersen. “Like in the video work Kassaram, you could see my children and husband.” In the video, projected on a wall, the artist uses a performative methodology to engage the puissant idea of beauty in Africa but also how it doesn’t exist without the companionship of violence.
Also honing a multidisciplinary approach is Kofi Agorsor, whose work can be spotted at the centre of the show, where the artist arranges a congregation of wooden figurines surrounding a “main deity”. Staging a sculptural theatre of aesthetic and meditative possibilities, the artist who invests about 5-14 years into modelling each of his pieces draws from designs inspired by Efa mythology and Indigenous African shrine architecture for his work in Unlimited III.
Agorsor’s wood sculptures and abstract paintings touch on the expansive ideas of bonding beyond bloodline. Two separate canvases populated with semi-abstract figures show different types of abstract painting, one with clear cut lines for colour distribution, while the other canvas comes with visual chaos to a graffiti-esque degree, still maintaining a sense of calm from the rhythm of the splashes and streaks. The kind of African family Agorsor comes from is “loosely defined by complex modes of affiliations and myths in an all-encompassing sense of belonging.”
Like Agorsor, Isshaq Ismail taps into traditional indigenous forms as an inspirational source. West African masks worn for ritual ceremonies are influential in Ismail’s exploration of new aesthetic experiments. He pursues “infantile semi-abstraction” as a style to create “a sense of timelessness”. The artist’s methodology kicks off from an imaginative memory to outlining with a pencil prior to painting.
Ismail’s characters have animated expressions infused with colourful dynamism. His works: Ade3 A Ay3 Wodia Yen Pre Hu (Don’t rush if you are the owner), Freedom of Knowing, Indulgence and Consolation; all acrylic on canvas works made between 2022 and 2024, deconstruct the boundaries of colour, contrast and texture with thick and loose brushstrokes. The artist’s canvases portray an array of ambiguous characters whose social, cultural, emotional and political backgrounds are not detectable.
The images are anonymous so they can be relevant to any viewer, allowing space for ancestral families, and an engaging atmosphere for memories of the unknown to be harnessed. Lately, Ismail has been building on an extended version of a series with Efiɛ Gallery.
Kelvin Haizel’s pieces epitomise a conceptual framework concerning “the present contemporary era with aesthetics as a point of conversation”. His abstract paintings factor in braille and kaolin for a tactile experience. Notably, Haizel’s interest in abstraction did not begin with a historical study. His light-bulb moment came from seeing local impressionist abstraction in Ghana’s paint shops, where he bought his art supplies. Following this inspiration, the artist targets flowing natural environment forms that “assert their agency in space”. “I don’t want to politicise the abstraction. But the fact is aesthetics is also politics,” he points out. At the gallery, aside from an isolated pink-toned canvas, a group of three large pieces which are predominantly green, blue and brown are installed. To Haizel, the green relates to vegetation while the blue has an oceanic resonance and the browns cannot be left out because “all your shades of brown are beautiful”.
In reference to the African family theme, Haizel shares, “We can’t just reduce a family to humanist terms, but in categories of things, different spaces and geographies.” From the traditional to the contemporary, the conceptualisation and meaning of family especially in Africa, as shown in diverse ways by the exhibiting artists, traverses customary constraints – and this could be the requisite tool for shaping global solidarity.