Rita Mawuena Benissan - The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold: London
Gallery 1957 is pleased to present The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold, the London debut solo exhibition by Rita Mawuena Benissan, opening on Tuesday, 14th October 2025.
Known for her research-driven, materially rich explorations of Ghanaian cultural memory, Benissan presents a new body of work that reclaims historical photographic archives through acts of colour, stitch, and sculpture. Drawing on collections across Europe and the United States, the artist reanimates late 19th and early 20th-century portraits of Ghanaian royals, elites, and anonymised subjects - figures long held in stasis by the colonial gaze.
Benissan’s practice has always centered on the aesthetics of sovereignty. Her first solo exhibition reimagined the royal umbrella not only as a ceremonial structure, but as a potent, living symbol of authority and memory. In The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold, that impulse toward re-inscription deepens. Here, Benissan turns toward historical photographs that have often been preserved with little or no information about their subjects, and uses colour, scale, and recontextualisation to ask: What if the stories were told differently? What if Black figures in the archive were not frozen in monochrome, but remembered in full vibrancy, being seen in the dignity they always held?
Many of the photographs Benissan reclaims were taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before Ghana became Ghana, during the era of the British-controlled Gold Coast. Though they depict African subjects, these images remain largely housed in European and American institutions, where they are catalogued, preserved, and framed within foreign systems of knowledge. Benissan’s work responds to this paradox: what does it mean to reclaim a visual archive that one does not materially own? Her reimaginings, then, are not only artistic gestures but acts of symbolic repossession; ways of returning presence, dignity, and colour to images long held in colonial custody.
Set within the Victorian surrounds of Gallery 1957’s London space, the exhibition reimagines the architecture itself as a speculative archive — a reversal of imperial narrative. What if this building, once emblematic of British decorum and control, had always housed the visual legacies of Ghanaian royalty? What if the archives belonged not to the coloniser, but to the colonised?
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