Frieze Seoul 2025

For our third presentation at Frieze Seoul, Gallery 1957 is thrilled to present an expansive and layered group exhibition, bringing together 15 contemporary African and diasporic artists whose works pulse with resonance, materially, emotionally, and conceptually.

Featuring new and recent works by Amoako Boafo, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Kwesi Botchway, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Larry Amponsah, Modupeola Fadugba, Jonathan Okoronkwo, Kelvin Haizel, Nabeeha Mohamed, Johannes Phokela, Godfried Donkor, Wonder Buhle Mbambo, Daniel Arnan Quarshie, Denyse Gawu‑Mensah, and Nana Bruce.

Spanning painting, collage, textile, and mixed media, this presentation explores how personal and collective memory, historical residue, and visual culture intersect in the formation of contemporary African identity. A central thread is the reframing of the self — not only as a subject of representation, but as a medium of history, ritual, and myth.

Quaicoe’s brooding self-portrait channels a dreamlike encounter with an older version of himself, while Haizel’s clay-infused paintings quietly mark the passage of time through shredded threads and counted tallies. Mbambo weaves spiritual symbolism into sculptural canvases using found objects and ancestral floral motifs, while Quarshie’s introspective charcoal works transform ordinary rites — naming ceremonies, blessings — into moments of intimate reverence.

Fadugba captures communal joy and choreography through layers of movement, while Amponsah and Benissan intervene in historical and photographic archives to reconstruct the narratives embedded in material culture. In her textile-based portraits, Gawu‑Mensah draws from her family albums to honour the quiet intimacies of military brotherhood and neighbourhood friendship, folding memory, mourning, and kinship into her materials. Okoronkwo’s scorched, oil-slicked constructions speak from the industrial heart of Kumasi’s Suame Magazine, where discarded car parts and volatile substances become metaphors for survival and decay.

Elsewhere, Mohamed explores belonging, memory, and the emotional architecture of home through richly textured still lifes, while Phokela uses layered wit and painterly strategy to interrogate postcolonial identity and historical image-making. Donkor’s archival collages critique the mechanisms of empire and commerce with poetic precision, and Bruce’s vibrant portraits of contemporary Ghanaian women meditate on the layered meanings behind beauty rituals, creating a site of self-encounter and transformation, grounding the presentation in lived realities and emergent futures.

Taken together, these artists offer a vital, multifaceted picture of African contemporary art — one rooted in place and personal history, yet constantly in conversation with wider cultural, political, and aesthetic forces. Rather than a singular narrative, the presentation reveals a constellation of voices and visions, each reshaping how Blackness, memory, and modernity are seen, felt, and reimagined today.

Join us at Booth A08 from 3 - 6 September 2025 to experience the works in person!

Location:

COEX, 513 Yeondon-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea

Opening Hours:

Wednesday, September 3: 11:00 –19:00 (invitation only)
Thursday, September 4: 11:00 – 19:00 (invitation and preview ticket holders only; 11:00 – 15:00, open to the public from 15:00)
Friday and Saturday, September 5 – 6: 11:00 – 19:00