Notes on Friendship: Breaking Bread explores friendship as a dynamic space for dialogue, critique, and support. It offers a platform where shared histories and present-day realities intersect, opening up new possibilities for connection and collaboration. This flexible idea of friendship allows artists to form relationships on their own terms, encouraging mutual exploration and creative engagement.
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Framed as a "lost tape" rediscovered in African history, Notes on Friendship: Breaking Bread reimagines hosting and hospitality as acts of political and artistic significance, featuring 23 artists from East and West Africa.
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Bringing together artists from different generations and working across both traditional and contemporary media—painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and video—the exhibition presents a rich, layered conversation around identity, history, and aspiration. It invites audiences into a shared space of artistic vision and cross-cultural exchange.
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Artists
Galle Winston Kofi Dawson
Jojo Abdallah
© Agnes Waruguru, Manda, 2019
Agnes Waruguru
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Agnes Waruguru is a Nairobi-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans textiles, ceramics, printmaking, and installation. Her practice, often rooted in personal experience, explores the human connection to land, memory, grief, and spirituality—frequently using water as both a medium and metaphor.
A graduate of SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), Waruguru has taken part in residencies across the globe including Amsterdam, Sydney, and Brazil. Her work has featured in the Stellenbosch Triennale, Videobrasil Biennial, and the 60th Venice Biennale, where she represented a deeply reflective and elemental approach to contemporary art.
© Beatrice Wanjiku, The Substance of Things (detail), 2025
Beatrice Wanjiku
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Beatrice Wanjiku is a celebrated Kenyan artist whose introspective work explores the psyche, identity, and emotional complexity of the human condition. Her canvases, marked by haunting abstract figures, interrogate societal norms and internal conflicts, drawing from her lived experiences and environment.
With a career that spans prestigious exhibitions like the Sharjah Triennial, Venice Biennale, and Mercosul Biennial, Wanjiku has received numerous fellowships and residencies. Her work is a profound mirror into the layered, often fragile structures that define individual and collective realities.
© Daniel Quarshie, The First Supper (detail) 2012
Daniel Arnan Quarshie
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Daniel Arnan Quarshie is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist whose work spans drawing, installation, sculpture, and sound. His practice explores profound social themes such as death, memory, and the passage of time, while critiquing capitalism, labor, and environmental degradation. Drawing on traditional, religious, and artistic influences, he examines the interconnectedness of the physical, soul, and spirit realms. His works often use layering and fragmentation to represent a non-linear understanding of time and space, creating multisensory pieces that blur genre boundaries.
Quarshie holds both a BFA and MFA from KNUST in Kumasi and is affiliated with the blaxTARLINES Kumasi art community. He participated in documenta fifteen and has been a resident at Gallery 1957 and the KFW Foundation’s “Frankfurt Moves!” His solo exhibitions include Sympathetic Magic (2023) and Reserve of Dead White (2024). He has shown work at major exhibitions in Accra, Lagos, Masaka, and Vienna, consistently pushing the boundaries of contemporary Ghanaian art.
© Dennis Muraguri, Krook 1 Umoinner Sacco​ (detail), 2012
Dennis Muraguri
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Dennis Muraguri is a multidisciplinary artist renowned for his woodcut prints and sculptures celebrating Kenya’s matatu culture—those vibrantly decorated public minibuses that dominate Nairobi’s streets. His work blends graffiti, music, and urban politics, using the matatu as a lens for social commentary.
Educated at the Buruburu Institute of Fine Art, Muraguri has exhibited widely in Nairobi and abroad, including at the 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair and Kochi-Muziris Biennale. A member of the Kuona Collective, his installations and prints capture the pulse of Kenyan street life, global pop culture, and urban aesthetics.
© Eric Gyamfi, Certain Winds from the South (Video screengrab), 2012
Eric Gyamfi
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Eric Gyamfi is a Ghanaian photographer and artist whose work challenges and reimagines the photographic medium. With academic training in economics, information studies, and fine art, Gyamfi focuses on expanding the material and conceptual boundaries of photography. His process-driven practice reprograms traditional photography to explore issues of time, transformation, and identity.
His work has been shown at prestigious festivals and institutions including the Vienna Biennale, Bamako Encounters, FOAM, and the Berlinale. He has also participated in major photography workshops and residencies across Africa. Gyamfi’s experimental approach offers a critical lens on photography’s role in documenting and shaping contemporary realities.
© Florence Wangui, Wait for It (detail) undated
Florence Wangui
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Florence Wangui is a Nairobi-born artist whose expressive charcoal and oil works explore the intricacies of everyday life with a surreal twist. Initially trained in Zoology and Biochemistry, she transitioned into art under the mentorship of Patrick Mukabi and later developed her oil painting techniques with artist Dolores Gomez. Her work often features animals and human figures imbued with personality and emotional depth.
Wangui’s versatility has seen her produce stained glass and bronze sculptures for sacred spaces, as well as contribute to major collections globally. Represented by One Off Gallery, her pieces continue to capture public imagination with their technical mastery and introspective storytelling.
© Gideon Asmah, OMS Familial #007, 2025
Gideon Asmah
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Gideon Asmah is a multidisciplinary artist and visual storyteller whose work merges photography, film, and installation. His practice explores cultural memory, material reuse, and environmental consciousness. Initially focused on documenting Ghanaian architectural and aquatic cultures, he has expanded into repurposing second-hand textiles as commentary on sustainability and global waste.
Asmah collaborates with production houses like AHFP Films and contributes to creating cultural archives through documentary film. His art is exhibited and published across platforms that explore African identities, climate resilience, and the intersections between culture and environment.
© Jonathan Fraser, The Tower, 2021
Jonathan Fraser
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Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kenya whose thoughtful practice spans drawing, printmaking, plant pressing, audio-visual work, and writing. His art emphasizes care and attentiveness to the environment and explores the tensions between dream and consciousness, intuition and form. His process-driven work challenges the boundaries of material and invites layered interpretations of meaning.
A graduate of Kenyatta University, Fraser had his solo debut There Is A Time and A Place at Circle Art Gallery in 2021. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at 32° East, Uganda, and is set to participate in a Zurich-based residency in 2025, facilitated by Pro Helvetia. His drawings are held in private collections and have featured in several group exhibitions.
© Kelvin Haizel, A Thing About Forevers, 2016
Kelvin Haizel
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Working in various media, including photography, painting, and archival interventions, Kelvin Haizel is excited about the speculative potential of what he terms images about nothing. Images that are culled from the subcategories of objects. His practice combines personal inquiry and research into these subcategories of objectness to evolve an aesthetic that inverts the social stratifications of objects. After a long hiatus from painting, the artist has returned to the medium to engage with a visual language that is abstract, yet materialist and fictional.
Haizel’s solo exhibitions include: ‘We Do Not Sleep to Dream’, Gallery1957 Accra, Ghana (2024), ‘Archive of Experiences’, 8th Hamburg Photography Triennial, MARKK museum, Hamburg, Germany (2022), and ‘Babysitting a Shark in a Cold room: Comoros Encounters’, Zurich, Switzerland (2019) for which he was the recipient of A New Gaze 2 prize for contemporary photography. Group exhibitions by the artist include: ‘Beautiful Diaspora /You Are Not the Lesser Part’ Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, USA (2022); ‘This is Not Africa- Unlearn What You Have Learned’ ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2021), ‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’, Stellenbosch Trienniale, Stellenbosch, South Africa (2020); ‘Afrotopia’, Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017); ‘OderlyDisorderly’, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra, Ghana (2017). He is a PhD candidate at the Department of Fine Art and Curatorial Practice, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He earned his MFA (2018) and his BFA in Painting and Sculpture (2010) from the same institution.
© Leonard Kubaloe, Kafuni (Video screengrab) 2019
Leonard Kubaloe
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Leonard Atawugeh Kubaloe is a Ghanaian filmmaker, educator, and public health nutritionist based in Tamale. With over 14 years of filmmaking experience, Leonard creates socially conscious films that spotlight African history and culture—especially that of Dagbon. His work combines traditional storytelling with modern cinematic techniques, earning him accolades for films like Gonda Sheje (2013) and Pieli – The Rise of Montana (2017).
He is also the founder of OBL Studios, a hub for nurturing local filmmaking talent. Kubaloe’s film projects often intersect with his public health work, having collaborated with international NGOs like UNICEF and USAID. His ongoing feature Gangdu exemplifies his commitment to blending heritage with contemporary expression in ways that elevate African stories on a global scale.
© Maame Adjoa Ohemeng, What Will This Holy Grail Dominant Painting, (detail), 2024
Maame Adjoa Ohemeng
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Maame Adjoa Ohemeng is a Ghanaian artist and MFA student at KNUST, where she also majors in curatorial practice. Her mixed media works depict playful, dreamlike scenes influenced by children's stories, manga, anime, and spontaneous narratives from her surroundings. Through her fictional characters and storytelling, she explores themes of gender, sexuality, and feminist post-humanism.
Ohemeng is part of the blaxTARLINES collective and has exhibited in shows like Roses are Roselle Plants and are Hibiscus (2022) and A Little like a Dream (2023) at the National Museum of Ghana. In 2024, she earned second place in the Yaa Asantewaa Prize, recognizing her growing impact within Ghana’s art scene.
© Morris Foit, Owl, Undated
Morris Foit
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Morris Foit is one of Kenya’s most renowned sculptors. Born Morris Njau, he renamed himself Morris Foit, and an homage to Francis M. Foit, a Czech tutor he first met in 1966, who took an interest in young Foit’s creativity, and offered him his earliest lessons in sculpting.
Following a 14-year stint in the Kenyan military to support his family, Foit returned to sculpture and began exhibiting his early works at Gallery Watatu in Nairobi. Working mainly in wood, Foit creates sculptures of varying scale and complexity which display a keen understanding of the material. His works often chronicle key moments in the cycle of life and observations of social relationships.
© Maame Araba Opoku, Growing Pains (detail), 2025
Maame Araba Opoku
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Maame Araba Baboa Opoku is a multidisciplinary artist from Accra, Ghana, whose practice blends painting, performance, design, and mixed media. With a background in psychology, she uses abstraction and immersive installation to explore human behavior, the subconscious, and imagined worlds. Her works are deeply inspired by nature, mental landscapes, and spiritual ecologies.
Opoku’s exhibitions span globally, including shows at Lehmann Maupin (London), Museum Kunsthal KAde (Netherlands), and Nubuke Foundation (Accra). Notable solo exhibitions include Whispers Down The Lane (2023) and Come Hell Or High Water (2022). As the inaugural winner of the Yaa Asantewaa Prize (2021), she continues to experiment with layering, free association, and dreamlike visual languages to explore the interconnectedness of life and consciousness.
© Ngugi Waweru, Talk to the Hand, 2025
Ngugi Waweru
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Ngugi Waweru is a self-taught multimedia artist and co-founder of the Wajukuu Artist Collective. His work spans painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, focusing on themes like resilience, identity, and environmental impact. He transforms discarded materials into symbolic forms that reflect societal struggles and human endurance.
Waweru’s artistic philosophy is deeply rooted in communal learning and decolonial thinking. Through his work with Wajukuu, he has helped foster creative collectives and participated in global exhibitions, including Documenta Fifteen, where the group received the prestigious Arnold Bode Prize.
© Priscilla Kennedy, Blue Blood, 2023
Priscilla Kennedy
Priscilla Kennedy is a Ghanaian visual artist whose work interrogates memory, identity, and the body through multidisciplinary forms like installation, light works, and painting. A graduate of KNUST and a member of blaxTARLINES, her practice explores race, sexuality, and femininity through the metaphor of the octopus, presenting the body as a mutable, shifting entity. Her pieces examine how personal and historical narratives collide and reshape identity.
She has received numerous accolades, including the First Merit Award (2017 Barclays L’Atelier) and the 2022 Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize. Kennedy has exhibited in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uruguay, and Malta. Recent solo shows include A Thousand Disguises (2023) and Levitating in Thin Spaces (2024), where she continues to challenge perception through poetic and immersive art forms.
Robin Riskin
Robin Riskin is a curating-artist whose practice merges poetic curation with intermedia art, emphasizing hybridity, fluid identities, and collective creation. Her approach treats curation as an artistic organism, blending text, sound, film, and social engagement. Rooted in the blaxTARLINES Kumasi community, her work has appeared in institutions across Ghana and internationally. She employs experimental and communal methods to challenge linear and ethnographic modes of exhibition-making, drawing inspiration from indigenous and Afro-diasporic cultural practices.
Jojo Abdallah is an artist whose life and work are inseparable. A long-time studio resident at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Abdallah navigates roles of artist, patient, and visionary, creating work that transcends conventional boundaries. His voice and art are central to Psy-Tech_Open the Mystery (2024), a collaborative filmic mashup with Riskin. Their project reimagines art, psychiatry, and spirituality through speculative storytelling, suggesting new ways to interpret mental health, communication, and transformation in contemporary Ghana.
© Sidney Mang'ong'o, Untitled (detail), 2019
Sidney Mang’ong’o
Sidney Mang’ong’o began his art journey in his mid-20s, developing a layered, collage-based practice that evolved into geometric abstraction. His art explored socio-political commentary and urban decay, often through textures, vivid colors, and found imagery.
Influenced by fellow Kenyan artists and time spent at Kuona Trust, Mang’ong’o built a strong local and international presence through exhibitions at Circle Art Gallery and Jo’burg Art Fair. His critically acclaimed solo show Imagined Structures in 2018 remains a highlight of his creative legacy.
© Taabu Munyoki, Service Workers II, 2020
Taabu Munyoki
Taabu Munyoki is a contemporary artist from Nairobi, Kenya, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, ink, pastels, and digital art. Her bold use of color and form reflects an ongoing engagement with social and political issues, especially themes surrounding identity, gender, race, and self. Drawing from personal experiences, her work challenges conventional beauty standards and aims to provoke thought around the complex realities of human relationships and the environment.
A graduate of Kenyatta University, Taabu has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. She earned recognition in the Manjano art competition and participated in the MASK Prize exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London. Her residencies include Nafasi Art Space in Tanzania and Orkedi Residency in Kenya. Selected exhibitions include More is More (2024, HOF Gallery), Surfacing (2023, Kampala), and Various Small Fires (2021, Circle Art Gallery).
© WairimÅ© Nduba, Can You Hold a Sound? (Video screengrab) 2025
Wairimũ Nduba
Wairimũ Nduba is a Kenyan cultural worker and dancer whose practice centers African sonic traditions as spaces for healing, beauty, and communal gathering. Her work is deeply grounded in sound, archival research, and embodied movement.
With roots in dance and performance, Nduba explores the body as a vessel for memory and knowledge, often merging sonic and visual elements to create immersive, historically conscious experiences.
© nd00ta, Four Women in Four Time (detail)
nd00ta
nd00ta is a dynamic educator, cultural practitioner, and aspiring pole dancer whose work engages with themes of criminality, abolition, queer cultural production, and care within movement-building spaces. Rooted in zine-making and collaboration, their practice is deeply intertwined with freedom of expression and Black geohistories.
Their primary platform is their blog, ku[to]zurura, where much of their artistic and political thought is published. nd00ta’s work brings together community, creativity, and radical care, creating space for communal storytelling and imagining new futures.