Cornelius Annor - What Stains, What Stays: Gallery II, Accra
Gallery 1957 is proud to present What Stains, What Stays, a solo exhibition by Ghanaian artist Cornelius Annor, opening in Accra on 24 September, curated by Ato Jackson.
What Stains, What Stays explores memory, the archive and inheritance through Cornelius Annor’s engagement with photography, painting, textiles and objects. Drawing from family photographic albums, archival and found images of everyday life, Annor transforms moments of intimacy, care, joy and gathering into layered painted recollections.
At the centre of the exhibition is the photographic archive as a space of personal and collective memory. Family portraits, domestic interiors and scenes of companionship become starting points for paintings that move between documentation and imagination. Rather than reproducing photographs, Annor translates them through painting, allowing gestures, faces and everyday scenes to acquire new emotional and material lives.
Annor’s process is deeply material. Pigments transferred from African textiles onto canvas leave translucent stains that merge with painted figures, objects and interiors. As colour migrates from one surface to another, the textile becomes an imprint, offering a reflection on how memory, identity and cultural histories are carried across generations through movement, transformation and traces.
The exhibition extends this enquiry into furniture, mirrors and sculpture. Tables, vanities and drawers become “frames or containers of a certain moment” and witnesses to everyday life, holding traces of use, touch and time. A small number of sculptures by Annor’s late father, who carved expressive figures from timber, further introduce a quiet dialogue between generations and suggest inheritance as something carried through observation, proximity and repetition.
Through painting, textiles, furniture and sculpture, What Stains, What Stays considers how ordinary experiences become archives, and how images, materials, objects and relationships allow the past to continue inhabiting the present.
Download the press release & curatorial text below for more information.
