Artist, Kwabena Fordjour, will debut a solo exhibition, “Moving Without Moving,” from November 2 to December 3, 2025, at the Berj Gallery, a leading transformative art gallery in Ghana founded in 1996 by Joyce Quarshie, an avid art collector.
Based in Accra, Kwabena Fordjour’s new body of work presents episodic scenes that together explore the vulnerability of everyday motion in Accra—including its beauty both in imagery and narrative—as a vehicle for highlighting inequities in urban mobility.
Through a personal exploration of daily commuting, transportation routes, and human interactions, Fordjour’s impasto compositions unfold in the expansion of the city’s urban footprint, which is characterised by traffic congestion, rising motorisation rates, and increasing pollution, making commute times long and modes of transport uncomfortable.
Out of this exploration, Kwabena Fordjour acknowledges how we perform our humanity in shared spaces impacts others. How does one hold themselves up in this fast-paced age? He surmises that bus stops, taxi and lorry stations become terminals, serving as connecting devices of a sense of commonness as we navigate these daily routes.
Often delicate, fragmented and moderate, he rarely depicts his figures as free of obstruction. The colours Fordjour uses are just as significant for their evoking and expressive power, or for the way they connect the world of his figures to that of our own. These works express the humility of recognising that these salient experiences form a network that bonds us. The complex yet sensitive tone that Kwabena Fordjour achieves throughout the exhibition results in large part from the bustling energy of city life, which becomes for him a site of introspection and deliberation.