Where the Earth Remembers: Galleria Mall, Third Floor, Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast, Accra
For its 10th anniversary, Gallery 1957 proudly presents Where the Earth Remembers, an important group exhibition curated by Marwan Zakhem at UNLIMITED.
Bringing together leading artists from Ghana, across Africa and its diaspora, Where the Earth Remembers reflects on memory, inheritance and place through artists whose practices Gallery 1957 has championed over the past decade.
The exhibition brings together Ibrahim Mahama, Gideon Appah, Amoako Boafo, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Modupeola Fadugba, Godfried Donkor, Kaloki Nyamai, Yaw Owusu, Jeremiah Quarshie and Jonathan Okoronkwo, alongside Professor Ablade Glover and Abdoulaye Konaté. Spanning generations, geographies and artistic approaches, their works reflect the breadth and evolving scope of Gallery 1957’s programme.
Rather than presenting a singular account of African art, Where the Earth Remembers explores how artists across the continent and its diaspora engage inherited histories, transforming memory into new forms of knowledge, expression and representation.
At its heart, the exhibition considers the earth as a living repository of memory, holding traces of successive lives, histories and transformations. This relationship between land and memory resonates throughout the exhibition, from the materials artists employ — cloth, wood, jute, pigment and archival photographs — to the body, ancestral traditions and the landscapes that hold the histories of a continent. These traces are not simply preserved but reinterpreted, allowing the past to remain active and relevant in the present.
Conceived for UNLIMITED’s monumental industrial architecture, the exhibition features new commissions and site-responsive installations. Spanning 1,400 square metres, the space offers artists the freedom to realise works of exceptional scale and ambition. Its raw concrete surfaces, 4.5-metre ceilings and exposed industrial structure become integral to the exhibition, accommodating monumental installations alongside more intimate encounters.
Held in Accra, the city Gallery 1957 has called home for a decade, Where the Earth Remembers marks ten years of championing artists whose practices engage with the histories and experiences that shape our present. It is both a reflection on this journey and a declaration of what lies ahead. The earth remembers. So do these artists. And so, we hope, will those who come to see it.
