-Susanna Tarkowski
Curated by Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah
08 – 30. January 2026
There is a particular kind of quiet that greets you at buro. Not the silence of absence, but the hush of focused energy—keyboards tapping softly, conversations unfolding in low tones, ideas circulating in the air. It is within this lived-in rhythm that A Place for Memories reveals itself, almost gently, asking you not to rush, not to skim, but to arrive fully.
Entering Susanna Tarkowski’s exhibition feels less like stepping into a discrete gallery room and more like moving through a slow, attentive corridor of thought. Installed along an elongated passageway, the exhibition unfolds rhythmically, asking viewers to walk, pause, and recalibrate their gaze. This physical movement becomes integral to the curatorial experience: the act of walking mirrors the way memory itself operates—fragmented, sequential, and quietly accumulative.
Walking into the exhibition, I am struck by how naturally Susanna Tarkowski’s works inhabit the space. They do not announce themselves loudly. Instead, they wait. Small, intimate paintings—often arranged in clusters, diptychs, and grids—draw you closer, demanding the kind of attention we rarely give anymore. This is not an exhibition you pass through quickly; it is one you slowly enter.
The gallery’s architecture plays a decisive role. Clean white walls stretch forward beneath exposed ducting and timber-lined ceilings, while soft, natural light filters intermittently into the space. Rather than competing with the works, the industrial clarity of the environment frames them with restraint.
Tarkowski’s practice moves fluidly across painting, poetry, movement, and material experimentation, and this multiplicity feels less like a strategy than a necessity. Speaking with her during the visit, it becomes clear that memory is her primary medium. Painting, writing, dancing, crocheting—each becomes a parallel language for recording experience. None translates the other directly, yet all speak from the same source. Her works feel like pages torn from a diary, not in a confessional sense, but in their insistence on detail: the colour of a room, the rhythm of a place, the quiet residue of a shared moment.
Many of the paintings map locations—Legon, Ada, Busua, Jamestown, Romania, Poland—but Tarkowski is careful to remind me that these are not portraits of places as such. They are portraits of being there. The works compress entire encounters into fragments: a hairstyle becomes a symbol, a landscape collapses into colour, a human figure drifts into an object-like form. Memory, she explains, is never singular. It is layered, partial, and deeply subjective. What stays is not the whole scene, but the details that mattered.
Curator Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah, during the visit, reflects on the challenge—and pleasure—of working within an office space. Rather than imposing a white-cube logic, the exhibition responds to what already exists: walls punctuated by fixtures, decorative elements, the daily flow of work life. The curatorial approach becomes one of integration rather than interruption. Strings introduce new hanging levels without altering walls; small works are allowed to hold their own through careful spacing and rhythm. Patrick describes the process as adventurous, intimate, and deeply satisfying—“making the best out of very little,” a philosophy that resonates strongly with Tarkowski’s own attention to compression and detail.
What emerges is an exhibition that quietly resists the culture of speed. These works ask you to pause, to notice, to sit with ambiguity. Some paintings carry warmth and light—Waves of Love comes to mind—while others hold tension, confronting , time, or residue of experiences stored in the body. Tarkowski speaks about thoughts as bubbles, memories as cells, love as a force that moves like water—soft, violent, persistent, unstoppable. Even when the imagery drifts toward the surreal, it remains grounded in a life cycle, whether external encounters or internal, meditative visions.
The repetition of format across the installation creates a sense of continuity while allowing subtle variation to emerge. As viewers move from one grouping to the next, patterns begin to surface: shifts in palette, density, and internal rhythm signal emotional or temporal transitions. The works resist linear narrative, instead proposing memory as an associative field—one image activating another through colour, proximity, or affect.
A curatorial text positioned along the walkway anchors the exhibition conceptually without overwhelming it. Titled A Place for Memories, the statement frames memory as both fragile and generative, emphasizing how recollection reshapes experience rather than simply preserving it. Importantly, the text does not overdetermine interpretation; it functions as an invitation rather than an instruction, leaving ample space for viewers to form their own emotional and intellectual connections.
The presence of plants, seating, and open communal areas further softens the boundary between exhibition space and lived environment. Rather than isolating the artworks within a sealed gallery context, the installation allows them to coexist with everyday movement and conversation. This integration reinforces the exhibition’s central concern: memory as something that inhabits daily life, not something preserved only in moments of stillness.
There is something deeply fitting about encountering this body of work in a space dedicated to daily cooperate practice, productivity, and community. You might be heading to your desk and find yourself pausing unexpectedly before a painting, caught by a colour pairing, a repeated form, a sensation you cannot quite name—but recognize nonetheless.
This Walk-In makes one ponder about what we choose to remember, and how. What we archive. What we let slip. Tarkowski’s exhibition does not give answers; it opens a space. And sometimes, that is more than enough.
Coverage by Kezia Ouomoye 1/26/2026
(c) 2026