Weight of the Ordinary

Nubuke Foundation, Accra · Through 29 August 2026

Weight of the Ordinary sits well in Nubuke Foundation’s brutalist building, a cantilevered concrete slab whose wide walls and tall ceilings make for contemplation. Here, familiar domestic things cease to be usual. Josiah Tsibu Manu’s Kwesiada Anopa renders a bedroom: armchair, bed, woman in ceremonial dress, gold jewellery painted over the image, white lace over the painted bed. It looks the way memory looks, incongruent, or congruent but not harmonious. Priscilla Agbeti’s Open Secret (2025) sets a worn doormat in a wooden frame, nails forming a loom; woven above, loose threads below. The mat looks worn, the weaving controlled: an ordinary object becomes an archive of labour. On King David Osabutey’s miniature paper house, the door carries a declaration of refusal, then widens to take in boys, girls and everything between. A door is a threshold; here, a proposition about who is permitted inside.

Gabriel Selassie Tsagli, Son of Kafui

Gallery 1957, Accra · Through 12 September 2026

Walk into Gallery 1957 and you will be drenched, if you are not careful, by the washes of colour in Son of Kafui, Gabriel Selassie Tsagli’s first exhibition on the home continent after decades in Berlin. On your left, an iron totem stacks three figures: his mother at the base, Tsagli in the middle, his two-year-old daughter at the top. That is the emotional bracket of works made this year, though his mother’s passing and his daughter’s birth happened in the last two. On the central wall, Rave (2026) commands with the multiplicity of personalities Tsagli encountered in the rave scenes of Berlin and Accra. Turn right and Blue Notes (2026) goes quiet: sea, distant vista, grand piano, flailing hands. If Rave is social choreography, this is private grief and melancholia on a grand scale. More heart-rending still is Kafui (2026), his mother reduced to a blue silhouette against jet-black.

Frank Coffie, Between and Almost Far from Hard Walls
Worldfaze Art Practice, Ogbojo · Opened 1 August · No closing date announced
Yarn does different work in different parts of Frank Coffie’s show. In Women of Valour, four women stand with hands raised over the shoulders of a kneeling man. Three have painted faces, their bodies and ceremonial kente made tactile with yarn. The fourth is a featureless silhouette webbed over in white, the frills left to hang off the canvas. In a forthcoming extended interview for Art Report Africa, Coffie says they are his mother, partner, sister and grandmother; he lost his grandmother a year ago. Yarn here separates the living from the dead, and the painting literalises the total role women play in underwriting male journeys.
The twelve wool tapestries look fun, perhaps too fun on account of the colour, and near enough to samples for work still to be made. Then Coffie tells you what they are. At the gym, praying, sunbathing, alone: a taxonomy of what he did to get himself out of a funk. Yarn here sorts states of mind rather than states of being. The colour is the method, not the mood, a catalogue of survival tactics passing itself off as a set of swatches, and one that would impress Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Between them, Ghana Man Champion finds masculine self-command in an amateur boxer, and Uncle is Showing Kunfu the pleasure of watching a
neighbour’s television because he let you in.