Participants – CritLab.

Participants (2023)

Akosua Odei

Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

Kwabena A. Yeboah is a writer who reports on the arts, culture, health, science, and politics in Ghana.

Anakwa Dwamena

Blebo Michael Jackson

Blebo Michael Jackson also known as Troy was born in Accra, Ghana in July 1993 where he currently lives and works. Troy got his Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts – BFA (Sculpture) in 2018 from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. Currently, working as a visiting artist and understudied the patron/artist Kwame Akoto Bamfo at Osramba studios at Ada, from August 2018 – till date. Scale plays a major role in his artworks as he was influenced by the large scale works of some artist such as Richard Serra, Laurie Lipton, Ibrahim Mahama, Adonna Khare etc. He employs sculpture, installation and drawing at the helm of his practice. Troy still experiment, as he’s inspired by the environment as it is flooded with visible and invisible patterns of objects which in a way turn out to present itself as abstract. He explores layers of deep memory and fiction that bear the forces (good/evil) in the environment as would be objectified through his artwork as biomorphic drawings. He has featured in some few group exhibitions in and outside KNUST campus such as the 3rd Annual Creative Art Exhibition (Nubuke Art foundation, Accra. 2016), KNUST Art Festival (USTival, KNUST, Kumasi, 2018), 4th Annual Creative Art Exhibition (Ndoleb Event Center, Tesano 2018). He participated in a juried exhibition by Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) titled The Return of the slaves in Elmina Castle (Cape Coast, 2015), Pidgin Imaginarium and Counter State Mythology (Chalewote Street Art Festival, Accra, Ghana, 2019 and 2020) respectively.

Botembe Moseka

Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

Kwabena A. Yeboah is a writer who reports on the arts, culture, health, science, and politics in Ghana.

Awanle Ayiboro

Blebo Michael Jackson

Courage Hunke

Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

Kwabena A. Yeboah is a writer who reports on the arts, culture, health, science, and politics in Ghana.

Helena Sackey

Blebo Michael Jackson

Laetitia Nsoutou

Nana Adwoa Frema Amoabeng

Nana Adwoa Frema Amoabeng is a professional artist who specializes in landscape Acrylic paintings, through a combination of colour, texture, and style. She also has expertise in painting on t-shirts and interior & exterior decor. She has obtained a Professional Certificate from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design. She loves poetry and loves to design with natural objects. She has exhibited her Artwork at Alliance Française Accra, Republica Accra, and also an in-house artist at the Bedford art gallery where she has worked for three years. She is passionate about teaching and offers courses for kids with special needs at New Horizon Special school and also has a summer class with kids at Mommzi Kidsville. She has also been featured in the Daily Dispatch newspaper on ‘The face of Art Work in the Digital World’. Frema is optimistic about the future of women’s participation in the Ghanaian art scene and looks forward to taking her work in many places.

Kay Kwabia

Livingstone Amoako

Livingstone Amoako (b. 1976) hails from Seniagya in the Ashanti Region of Ghana where he lives and works. He has drawn particular attention for his colossal snail shells installations – distinctive large-scale forms of thousands of snail shells sourced from market women in Kumasi. He then through ardent process of assemblage, puts them together with binding wire, and mostly installs them at public spaces. His monumental pieces draw connections between consumption, waste, environmental issues and climate change. Livingstone was trained at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi where he had both his BFA and MFA. He has exhibited extensively in particular Kumasi and Accra. Notable of the exhibitions are “Cornfields in Accra”, 2016 and “Orderly Disorderly”, 2017 at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra. Many of Livingstone’s monuments are variable in forms, they can be shaped in any way and rehabilitated in appearance for each installation. Working with wood, clay, resin, stones and most recently the discarded empty snail shells, Livingstone discontinues with sculpture’s traditional obedience to forms of permanent shape while visually referencing the history of abstraction in African and European art. The sculptures in wood and ceramics introduce ideas about the function of objects in everyday life, and the role of language in deciphering visual symbols. Livingstone integrates African proverbs, poems and sometimes Adinkra symbols in his work.

Jeff Atuobi

Prince Amanfo

I am Prince Amanfo An artist in fine Art and a sculptor too I had my degree at University of Education Winneba and collage of Art and industry Kumasi. I taught at Just Love senior High School – Obuasi, Teaching Assistance at Boa Amposem Senior High School – Dunkwa, Winneba Secondary and Adisadel College. I proceeded to teach art in an international school, Dison International I do painting, pencil work, sculpture, room designs, landscape and many more I live in Accra, Pokuase I have stop teaching and wants to concentrate on the art more because it was consuming all my time and I had less time to work So I’m now home and working as a full time artist.

Ornela Tchinjo

Sharifah Issaka

I am a multi-disciplinary creative living and working in Accra, Ghana. I was born in Ghana but raised between Canada and Saudi Arabia: a cross-continental upbringing that would go on to inform both my academic and creative pursuits. After studying Global Development (Queen’s University) and Media Studies (The New School), I returned home to the continent and got to work. My career path has been decidedly non-linear (including work in film, design, tourism, and journalism), but the common thread has always been my desire to share my deep admiration for her country, culture, and creative community with the wider world. I have done many things, but everything I do is for Ghana.

Sihle Motsa

Sheilla Aishetu Nelson

Aisha dreams, writes, thinks, creates and is currently a college teacher in Accra, Ghana.

Some of her writing was shortlist by Erbacce Press; another won Akwantuo Writing’s Harmattan Poetry Prize.

More of Aisha’s work has featured in outlets including Kalahari Review; an Accra Theatre Workshop stage production, an African Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office and other Short Plays; One Ghana One Voice; Phillis Wheatley Chapter’s annual Chicken Soup publication; Munyori Literary Journal; a Writers Project of Ghana poetry anthology, ‘According to Sources’; Saraba Magazine; a Caine Prize short story anthology, ‘Lusaka Punk and other Stories’; Prairie Schooner; the ‘Spectacles. Speculations…’ curatorial art exhibition at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST; and Obsidian, a journal of Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.

Later translated into African languages including Ga, Luganda and Kiswahili, ‘Aku the Sun Maker’ is Aisha’s first children’s storybook.

With her manuscript of collected short fiction, ‘Lens and other Stories’, she won The Professor Kofi Awoonor Literary Prize (2018: Fiction).

On her recent rediscovered love for visual art forms including ideograms and amateur photography, Aisha seeks to explore the un/intended outcomes and effects of juxtaposing genre literatures and said visual art forms.

Having tentatively self-named this creative contraption Pictry, Aisha shares some of this, together with her other writing, on her blog, ‘Nu kɛ Hulu (Water and Sun)’: https://aishawrites.wordpress.com

Xene Sky

Yaa Addae

Yaa Addae, also known as yaa the plant, is a Ghanaian-British multidisciplinary strategist. The emancipatory potential of play is central to her practice, as is dreamwork. Rooted in indigenous African invention, Yaa works to reimagine cultural infrastructure and expand means of producing art histories. Drawn to collective knowledge-making, Yaa co-birthed ‘Black Diaspora Literacy: From Negritude to Drake’ with frequent collaborator, Muna Mohamed. Supported by Tufts University’s Experimental College, ‘YANA’ designed and brought to life a 10 week course on the interconnectedness of Black cultural production throughout the diaspora. Later, Yaa was a researcher for The Mobile Pavilion and culminating Cultural Encyclopedia of African Art: Ghana Volume, powered by Ano Institute of Arts and Knowledge following the national pavilion in 2019’s Venice Biennale. Based in Accra, she does freelance communications consulting in the creative industry and daydreams about regenerative creative ecosystems via the art futurist studio, A-kra. She is also the founder of the online anticolonial art theory school, Decolonize The Art World. Currently, Yaa is a 2020 Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellow.

Allessandra Giuditta

Sheilla Aishetu Nelson

Aisha dreams, writes, thinks, creates and is currently a college teacher in Accra, Ghana.

Some of her writing was shortlist by Erbacce Press; another won Akwantuo Writing’s Harmattan Poetry Prize.

Later translated into African languages including Ga, Luganda and Kiswahili, ‘Aku the Sun Maker’ is Aisha’s first children’s storybook.

With her manuscript of collected short fiction, ‘Lens and other Stories’, she won The Professor Kofi Awoonor Literary Prize (2018: Fiction).