ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Velvet Tensions is this year’s Dei Centre group exhibition. Each year, the group exhibition opens our walls to artists living and working in Ghana at every stage of their careers, from those showing publicly for the first time to established practitioners, and gives them a platform to present their work to a wider audience and to sell it.

This year’s edition came together through an open call. From 70 applications, 25 works by 24 artists were selected, spanning a wide range of media, generations and approaches.

THE THEME

Velvet is a material that remembers touch. Stroke it one way and it shines; stroke it the other and it darkens, holding the pressure of the hand. It is the fabric of thrones and of mourning. It is soft, and it is structured. It is never only one thing.

The exhibition takes that quality as its subject. The works gathered here hold opposites at once: softness pressing against violence, beauty that unsettles, intimacy that is also distance, restraint as the architecture of desire.

Velvet Tensions does not ask these contradictions to resolve. It asks what it means for artists working in Ghana today to make work inside them, and what that work asks of us when we stand before it.

OPENING NIGHT

Friday 6 November 2026, 6pm. All welcome.
On view 6 November 2026 to 2 January 2027 at the Dei Centre for the Study of Modern African Art, Tesano, Accra.

FEATURED ARTISTS