Kɔηsεt Pāti is the fifth project to be realised as part of the Art Exchange: Moving Image programme, running from 20th February to 15th March 2025. Its title references a Ghanaian television show that aired from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Curated by Abbey IT-A and hosted at the former Marvels Mini Golf Course, adjacent to Mmofra Place in Dzorwulu, Accra, the project playfully reinterprets the concept of the “moving image.” Through an exhibition strategy that shifts between screen-based and physical space, Kɔηsεt Pāti transposes the audiovisual aspirations of two films, exploring the relationship between virtual representation and embodied experience.
If it was through late-1960s arguments between Western artists that the moving image was finally ushered into canon, how can we present (artist-) films to a generation who may already be too familiar with its affect— especially when it is democratised via fast-paced online doomscrolling? How can we slow down the experience of motion pictures to implicate the body and position it to consciously share time and space with other things, to encounter them and/or be encountered by them? How can we inject theatricality back into cinema?
— Abbey IT-A
A key element of the project is a rotating screening structure, designed and built in collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of practitioners, including Adwoa Amoah, Ato Annan, Ahenkan Yeboah, Gershon Gidisu, Afrane Akwasi Bediako, Joshua Afoakwa, Emmanuel Kwasi Nyavor, Ebenezer Asiamah, Isaac Gyamfi A., and Abraham Tettey. Activated through public screenings and workshops, the space has hosted a three-week programme for school students and the wider public. Situated within a grove of small trees and plants, it is accompanied by the sounds of birds, distant traffic, and the spatial traces of a recently decommissioned playground.
Kɔηsεt Pāti presents the films in this manner and at a site that challenges visibility while heightening other sensorial elements in relation to its given environment. Through movement and the precarious lighting of the outdoors, the audiovisual images disappear, reappear, or blend in with everything else. They are not lost. Rather, they may become reactive and playful in ways that are not easily permissible in gallery or cinema halls. Beyond the screen, the moving image becomes many other things. For one, an act of lobbying for art educational programmes for young learners, whose responses may generate even further expansions.
— Abbey IT-A
At the centre of Kɔηsεt Pāti are two films that engage with themes of migration, displacement, and belonging. Certain Winds from the South (2023) by Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi is an adaptation of Ama Ata Aidoo’s short story, following a family in northern Ghana. The narrative unfolds when Issa arrives in the middle of the night to inform his mother-in-law, M’ma Asana, that he is leaving to find work in the south. By morning, she must explain to her daughter, Hawa, that the father of her newborn has gone.
Presented in direct dialogue with Gyamfi’s work is Relic 2 (2019) by British Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong, shown courtesy of the British Council Collection. The film depicts cascading UK landscapes and features a recurring character in Achiampong’s series—a child dressed in a makeshift spacesuit, known as the traveller. Over a sombre score, a voice delivers a soliloquy reflecting on the experiences of African diasporic life in the UK and beyond. Together, the films explore the geopolitical and socio-economic implications of movement. The exhibition brings these works into dialogue through voice and musical score, drawing connections across time and geography.
Gyamfi’s film is shot in a single take, which follows the cast of characters—literally—around a circular kraal. It is implied that although movement is perhaps non-linear and recurrent, return is still not guaranteed. This sentiment is also confronted in Larry Achiampong’s film. It opens with a diasporic voice describing distance as denoting “the numerical measurement of how far apart objects are from one another” but connoting something more insidious and orchestrated.
— Abbey IT-A
Kɔηsεt Pāti is hosted by the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA)-Ghana and the Mmofra Foundation. This first iteration of the project has been developed as part of Art Exchange: Moving Image, a curatorial development programme for curators from Sub-Saharan Africa organised by LUX, Yinka Shonibare Foundation, and Guest Artists Space Foundation, delivered in partnership with the British Council.
Image Credits: Photography by Isaac Gyamfi A. Courtesy of FCA-Ghana for Kɔηsεt Pāti (2025).
