A MIRROR ON ITS3LF

A group exhibition Organized by Compound House Gallery and co-curated by Nuna Adisenu-Doe and Caleb Asiamah Quartey at Foli Kwei Gallery

19 December 2025 – 19 February 2026

For this edition of Open Reflections, The Neoteric visited the opening of A Mirror on Itself, a group exhibition presented with measured clarity at Foli Kwei Art Gallery, West Legon, Accra. The exhibition situates itself as a thoughtful contribution to, offering a space for sustained engagement with image-making, material inquiry, and critical dialogue.

Intimate in scale yet expansive in dialogue, the gallery’s warm and carefully considered layout provided an effective setting for close engagement with the works. Clean architectural lines, soft lighting, and an uncluttered spatial flow allowed each work to register fully, encouraging sustained looking and conversation. The audience comprised art enthusiasts, fellow artists, curators, creative practitioners, and members of the Department of Painting and Sculpture faculty at KNUST—an assembly that underscored the exhibition’s grounding in both practice and critical discourse. Several of the exhibiting artists were present and took turns speaking about their work, offering visitors direct insight into their methods, materials, and conceptual frameworks.

A Mirror on Itself features works by Halimatu Iddrisu, Kwadwo Boafo, Eric Opoku Asare, Isaac Gyamfi, Courage Hunke, Maame Osaah Asamoah, Godelive Kabena Kasangati, and Michael Ansong. Organized by Compound House Gallery and co-curated by Nuna Adisenu-Doe and Caleb Asiamah Quartey, the exhibition approaches image-making as an active site of inquiry—where material, place, and reproduction loop back upon themselves.

Halimatu Iddrisu’s work centres the lived realities of women within Ghana’s Zongo communities. Working across painting and photography, she constructs intimate visual spaces shaped by layered social and structural forces, resisting simplification in favor of nuance, resilience, and quiet agency.

Similarly attentive to place, Kwadwo Boafo turns to Osu, tracing the visual and sensory tensions between historic architecture and contemporary urban development. His works absorb the smells, colours, and textures of the environment, translating spatial transformation into material and chromatic expression.

Drawing from the visual lexicon of Ghanaian hiplife culture in the 1990s, Eric Opoku Asare combines photography, sculpture, and painting to examine how images circulate, mutate, and accrue meaning over time. His contribution reveals a practice deeply invested in memory, place, and the afterlives of popular imagery.

Isaac Gyamfi approaches photography as a durational and process-led practice. His works, developed through sustained engagement with Srogboe near Keta, move beyond the single image, allowing time, labour, and repetition to shape an immersive meditation on community and presence.

For Courage Hunke, artistic practice functions as an extension of self. Through layered imagery and an experimental paper-making process incorporating discarded polythene bags, his works articulate narratives of growth, love, and identity rooted in communal experience and material transformation.

Artist, archivist, and researcher Maame Osaah Asamoah employs photography to capture gestures of memory, spirituality, and everyday life. Anchored in language—particularly Twi—her work operates as both a personal system of understanding and a means of cultural continuity, with a focus on youth as active bearers of heritage.

Through archival inquiry, Godelive Kabena Kasangati interrogates the image as a mutable form. Her focus on Basenji dogs within photographic archives from the DRC raises questions around reproduction as a speculative act—where circulation itself becomes generative, and images continually reconfigure their meanings.

We conclude with Michael Ansong, whose silkscreen works function as quiet archives of Accra’s urban surfaces. By attending to stains, tears, and creases—often overlooked traces of everyday life—his practice asks viewers to look closely at what is habitually ignored.

The exhibition probes the liminal space where images shift into pictures—where perception searches for material resolution. This inquiry is articulated not only conceptually but spatially, through a curatorial approach that privileges proximity, pause, and visual dialogue. Works are carefully paced across the gallery’s modest architecture, allowing negative space, sightlines, and bodily movement to become active agents in meaning-making. Framed paintings, photographic works, silkscreen prints, and sculptural interventions are positioned to face, echo, or interrupt one another, underscoring the exhibition’s concern with how images acquire form and presence.

Grounded in the distinction between the image as a mode of seeing and the picture as its material boundary, A Mirror on Itself gathers artists whose practices trouble this threshold. Viewers are seen lingering between works—often standing directly in the axis between opposing pieces—suggesting a curatorial intention that invites comparison rather than linear reading. The placement of works at varying heights and scales further resists hierarchy, encouraging viewers to oscillate between close inspection and peripheral awareness. Within this arrangement, we could deduce that the exhibition asks whether images ever fully resolve into fixed pictures, or whether they remain provisional—continually reconstituted through material, and the act of looking itself.

This grey zone, where seeing becomes making, is reinforced by the gallery’s intimate atmosphere: a bench positioned for rest and reflection, clean white walls punctuated by textured surfaces, and moments where artworks extend beyond the frame through material spill, surface distress, or sculptural contour.

Positioned as the latest extension of blaxTARLINES’ experimental and pedagogical ethos, Foli Kwei Art Gallery enters Accra’s contemporary art scene as a considered and timely initiative. Founded by artist and 2006 alumnus of The Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST, Foli Kwei, the gallery foregrounds the importance of sustained artistic practice alongside the development of supportive infrastructure for creative communities in Ghana.

Coverage by Kezia Oumoye 1/15/2026 | Images courtesy ©2025, Isaac Gyamfi A. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use, reproduction, or distribution Prohibited.

(c) 2026