Art in motion: Efie Gallery exhibition is a dance of African creative flair

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Efie Gallery is presenting Dance Will Be You (Jan. 23 – Mar. 26), a group exhibition borrowing its title from acclaimed African American poet Sonia Sanchez’s ‘We a BaddDDD People’ listed in a 1970 poetry collection book. The exhibition offers an exploration of the symbolic and performative dimensions of contemporary African art. It focuses on themes of contemplation, devotion and transcendence, each of which has deep cultural connotations. Sanchez’s reflections on transformative expression and unity echo in the exhibition, which engages with a multiplicity of interpretations and a multitude of artistic practices.

The works are in dialogue with the cultural currents across the African continent and her diaspora, exploring how the influences evolve, transform, and shape contemporary practices.

Those participating include artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Cuba), internationally acclaimed for her work that explores themes of memory, identity, and history, drawing from her Cuban and Yoruba heritage; J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije (1899-1989, British Accra, Gold Coast, now Ghana), whose extensive archive of photography documenting the cultural history from West Africa includes newly revealed images from the Deo Gratias Studio that capture communal moments of cultural reflection; Dina Nur Satti (b. 1987, Sudan/Somalia) who creates ceramic works deeply influenced by her studies of African art and pre-colonial African societies, which reflect on the role of objects in a palimpsest of consciousness and collective memory; and Myles Igwebuike (b. 1992, Nigeria/USA), who explores the Mbari houses of Igbo culture in his design practice, bringing ancestral knowledge into conversation with contemporary design.

‘We be a mirrored/ storm,/a night of soul’s fire/dancing’ — so said Sonia Sanchez in We a BaddDDD People. The title reflects the rhythmic and dynamic essence of her poetry, where movement is both a metaphor and a call — a dance that embodies a multiplicity of forms, states of being, and expressions, as exemplified in the Efie show. Water colour, gouache, and ink blend into one another in Interstellar, a triptych by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, composed of three panels, where the piece unfolds through a layering of techniques, materials and processes.

A historic photograph.

In it, Campos-Pons navigates the mysteries and depth of celestial spaces. The process itself turns into a site of multiplicity, where various approaches converge to ultimately embody her deep exploration of the divine and the transcendent. The sense of layering extends into her glass work, such as Reservoir for Love #2, where molten glass takes on fluid, abstract forms that play both with its static qualities and vibrant colours. Campos-Pons’s practice moves fluidly across disciplines, creating bodies of work with materiality becoming a portal for ancestral and cultural reflections.

J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije’s photographs offer a glimpse into the collective frequencies of ritual and celebration, where gestures of gratitude and remembrance stretch across generations. Liberians in Ghana, dancing and paying homage to the Jamestown stool, Accra in the 1960s, shows them migrating mid-motion across an image. A raised sword glints in the light, surrounded by a haze of shadow and fog, faintly immobilising the surrounding motion. The photograph is part of a selection from Bruce-Vanderpuije’s archives, documenting Liberians who settled in Jamestown, Ghana, for work and later became part of the community’s living patterns and cultural rhythms.

A work opens itself to the light.

Homowo, meaning “hooting at hunger” in the Ga language, frames this durbar — a celebration of resilience, gratitude, and joy. The festival, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, commemorates the end of a historic famine, transforming scarcity into abundance, hailing it through communal rituals, feasting, and dance. Each year, the gatherings reaffirm cultural bonds, connecting communites through shared acts of remembrance. Dina Nur Satti’s ceramics carry this sense of continuity across historical snapshots, informed by her research into pre-colonial African objects and their enduring significance. Her Lotus Series carries the symbolism of the lotus flower — rooted in mud, yet thrusting towards light — that speak of cycles of transformation and renewal.

For Dina, each piece is a vessel which connects to histories of rituals and the quiet resilience they embody. Like the objects she studies, her practice moves seamlessly between the spiritual and the functional, bridging ancient knowledge and contemporary expressions of reflection. From the intimate space of Satti’s vessels, Myles Igwebuike’s ECHICHE bench unfolds as both a product and a meditative offering. Drawing from the architectural traditions of Igbo Mbari houses — communal dwelling spaces — ECHICHE bridges the spiritual and the functional.

Works on the walls and the floor.

Adorned with carved symbols and motifs derived from Igbo cosmology, ECHICHE materialises Igwebuike’s research into how ancestral practices can inform contemporary design. As a site of contemplation, the work is a delicate balance between stillness and movement, where echoes of ancient devotion throb with trends of the present. Igwebuike’s work reimagines the Mbari tradition as a window, threading the past and present through the enduring language of time and space. Dance Will Be You offers a space to reflect on how influences from the African continent and her diaspora adapt and endure, and how they reshape themselves in the present. The works resist the temptation to resolve issues or define themselves. Instead, they invite us to move, between forms, ideas, and often unseen worlds. Through the works of Campos-Pons, Bruce-Vanderpuije, Satti and Igwebuike, we glimpse how multiplicity could guide us to embrace connectivity, of ideas, forms and peoples. Founded by the Ghanaian family of Valentina, Kwame and Kobi Mintah, Efie Gallery presents artists of African origin, both from the African continent and its global diaspora, for a dialogue between the Middle East and the greater region.