Exhibitions (selected)
Diasporic Frequencies: Sacred Ecopoetics (2024)
Diasporic Frequencies: Sacred Ecopoetics is a large-scale collaborative exhibition by Jeannette Ehlers, with the artists Lydia Östberg Diakité and Patricia Kaersenhout, presented at Rønnebæksholm (November 2023 – February 2024). Drawing from archival materials, newly produced video work, performance, installation, photography and collage, this group exhibition explores colonial legacies that shape land and body. Through poetic encounters with nature, earth, water, air, and diasporic histories, the works address collective memory, dispossession, and fugitivity. Works such as Östberg Diakité’s Cry Baby and kaersenhout’s The Soul of Salt foreground spiritual and historical continuities across continents, while newly commissioned pieces by Ehlers expand on themes of loss, repair, and healing. Read more
The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (2023)
PerAnkh – The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive is a survey exhibition spanning three floors, presenting nearly five decades of filmmaking across Africa and its diaspora. Through the extensive filmic archive of curator June Givanni, the exhibition explores how cinema and other forms of image-making articulate political relationships with memory, rupture, and aesthetics—revealing them as living, itinerant practices of image- and world-making across the continent and diaspora. These practices are fragmented, non-linear, hybrid, improvisational, and deeply situated in historical and affective geographies. Bringing together archival materials, a new commission by Chimurenga, literature, and audio recordings with a rotating public programme, weekly screenings, and installations, the exhibition highlights the legacies of pioneering filmmakers such as Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembène, Gaston Kaboré, and others. Read more
James Barnor: Accra/London A Retrospective (2021 - 2023)
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James Barnor: Accra / London – A Retrospective (May–October 2021), first held at the Serpentine Gallery, is the largest survey to date of the British-Ghanaian photographer’s oeuvre, spanning almost five decades of work. The exhibition traces Barnor’s trajectory from the Ever Young Studio in 1950s Accra during Ghana’s decolonisation, to postwar London and the wider UK in the 1960s, his return to Ghana in the 1970s to open the country’s first colour processing lab, his continued practice through the 1980s, and his eventual return to London in the 1990s. Foregrounding his role as a pioneering figure in modern image-making, the retrospective situates Barnor within intersecting histories of portraiture, fashion, and documentary practice. For diasporic cultural workers, the practice of photography itself is a vital means of forming and fashioning subjectivity—an attempt at self-articulation that shifts the periphery and affirms the margins as sites of memory. Through this retrospective, Barnor’s work is positioned not only as a cornerstone of Ghanaian and British photographic histories, but also as a living archive of diasporic experience and imagination. Read more
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James Barnor: Accra/London: A Retrospective, MASI Lugano, Lugano, March - July 2022
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James Barnor: Accra/London: A Retrospective, Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Detroit, May - October 2023
Jeannette Ehlers, Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms (2022)
Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms (June–August 2022) at Kunsthal Charlottenborg is an expansive solo exhibition by Jeannette Ehlers that forges intimate triangular relations between the Caribbean, West Africa, and Scandinavia. Through new commissions and existing film, performance, and photographic works, Ehlers creates a space of repair and fugitivity—of listening, reclaiming, and remembering. Central to the show is the video work Moko Is Future, which summons the mythic figure Moko Jumbie—a healer who, according to legend, crossed the Atlantic from West Africa to the Caribbean to guard her people—and brings that figure back to Copenhagen to illuminate the city’s colonial shadows and propose possibilities for healing. Full of poetic, bodily, and oral traditions—from the histories of cornrows as maps of escape routes in Caribbean slavery, to transcriptions of fictional dialogues between Kendrick Lamar and Tupac, and excerpts from H. C. Andersen’s Mulatten—the exhibition blends the historical, the collective, and the insurgent. It affirms the margins not as mere periphery but as sites of memory, resistance, and future-making, insisting on the reparative power of storytelling and the oral archive to reframe colonial pasts and orient toward collective freedom. Read more
We Are Not Myths: Opacity Across Difference (2021)
We Are Not Myths: Opacity Across Difference (September–October 2021) is a group exhibition at ArtHub Copenhagen that brings together artists Jeannette Ehlers, Santiago Mostyn, Nikhill Vettukattil, and Jelsen Lee Innocent in a collaborative project reimagining Nordic identity through the lens of Glissant’s theory of opacity. Located at Thoravej 29, Copenhagen, the exhibition works against clear-cut narratives of belonging, visibility, and uniformity by engaging histories and genealogies of Black Europe. Here, opacity becomes a method: resisting clarity and demanding respect for difference—unsettled, hybrid, and relational—rather than assimilation. Through installation, performance, film, archival practice, and new commissions, the works probe the intimate and the global, investigating how fugitivity, repair, rupture, and memory are lived across geographies. They insist on sites of tension and possibility between the Caribbean, West Africa, Black Europe, and the Nordics, refusing easy translation and asserting that identity is always already entangled. In doing so, the exhibition offers more than representation—it charts a curatorial praxis that is decolonial, polyphonic, and generative, marking the margins not as residues of power but as spaces of agency, world-making, and future-bearing. Read more
James Barnor: Past, Present Future (2021)
James Barnor: Past, Present, Future (April 2021) is a three-part digital exhibition for the Piccadilly Circus screen takeover, presented in collaboration with CIRCA, highlighting the themes and influence of Barnor’s masterful archive. The exhibition situates Barnor’s expansive oeuvre—spanning studio portraiture, photojournalism, fashion, and transnational archives—as a foundational point of departure for thinking about the importance of Black photography today. Barnor’s images hold within them the lived textures of migration, modernity, and self-representation, offering a visual language through which generations articulate identity and belonging. By bringing his work into dialogue with contemporary Black artists—Silvia Rosi, Thabiso Sekgala, Adama Jalloh, David Nana Opoku Ansah, and Lebohang Kganye—the exhibition creates an intergenerational framework that acknowledges Barnor not only as a pioneering figure but also as a continuing bridge to present image-making practices. Read more
Film and Moving Image Programmes (selected)
Un/Seen Spectres, Barbican Cinema, London, July 2023. Read more
Spectral Grounds: Black Experimental Film, Monangambee Film Foundation x British Council, Online, September 2022
South by South, South London Gallery, July 2023 - January 2024. Read more
Streams of Memories, The Showroom, Online, January 2021. Read more
Idrissa Ouédraogo: Hidden Figures, Barbican Cinema, London, September 2022. Read more
Echos in the Frame, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, London, June - August 2022. Read more
Ruptures beyond the Frame, Danish Film Institute/Cinemateket, Copenhagen, October - November 2021. Read more
Streams of Memories, Kunsthal Trondheim, Trondheim, January 2021. Read more
Ousmane Sembène: The Camera as a Weapon, Danish Film Institute/Cinemateket, Copenhagen, June - August 2021. Read more