Residencies

Gallery 1957 is thrilled to welcome Theresah Ankomah to our Artist in Residence program.

Theresah, awarded first place in the fifth edition of the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize in 2025, is a multidisciplinary Ghanaian Artist, who lives and works between Accra, Dabala and Kumasi. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Master of Fine Art in Sculpture from the College of Art and Built Environment, from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.

Gabriel Selassie Tsagli (b. 1988, Accra, Ghana) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician living between Accra and Berlin. Working across painting, music, performance, video, and movement, his practice explores belonging, emotional intelligence, and the potential of creative expression as a form of healing. Shaped by experiences of migration between Africa and Europe, Selassie approaches art as a holistic process that reconnects reason and emotion, body and mind, and the individual with the collective.

Dancing and painting became his earliest languages for processing the world around him, later expanding into music as a space where sound, movement, memory, and color converge. As Selassie writes, “My home is where colours are found, where music is played, where the body just moves and feelings have meanings.”

Selassie’s work is consciously conceived as an act of self healing and collective reflection. Influenced by post humanist thought and thinkers such as Bayo Akomolafe, particularly ideas around a contemporary crisis of belonging, he investigates how fragmented emotional states can be transformed into shared experiences of care and connection. His paintings, performances, and sound works function as emotional landscapes, engaging fear, longing, joy, rage, and tenderness, while embracing vulnerability as a form of strength. Central to his philosophy is the notion of “Sound Mind in a Sound Body,” through which visual art, sound, and movement form a unified practice.

 

His music is genre fluid and emotionally driven, combining soulful electronic textures, intuitive rhythms, spoken word, and melodic fragments. Drawing from African musical sensibilities, experimental electronic soundscapes, and embodied performance practices, Selassie creates immersive compositions that unfold slowly and intuitively. Listening becomes a participatory experience, inviting audiences to move through shifting emotional states rather than consume fixed narratives. Since releasing his first EP in 2019, he has continued to evolve musically. In 2021, together with producer Leon Weinhold, he released Hidden Identities, a project centered on self exploration, acceptance, and the multiplicity of the self.

 

Recent projects include the exhibition Pursuit of Happiness at Bunker k101, which engaged directly with the site’s layered history as both a place of trauma and remembrance and a space for healing through culture. Conceived as an immersive process, the exhibition rejected consumer oriented notions of happiness in favor of spiritual and psychological transformation. This work also connects to Selassie’s long term project, the Emotional Intelligence Agency, an evolving platform aimed at fostering emotional awareness through creative practice.

Selassie has presented solo exhibitions at Mahalla in Berlin, VRB Gallery Berlin, and Galerie Monica Ruppert in Frankfurt, and has participated in group exhibitions including NBB Gallery. His work has been shown internationally and he has collaborated with global brands such as Nike, MCM, and Asics. Self taught and instinct driven, Selassie’s practice resists fixed categories, instead offering art as a space of togetherness that speaks to the deeply human beyond origin, stereotype, or geography. As he states, “My art reflects the way I want to be loved.”

Yussif Musah (b. 1997) is an artist who lives in Kumasi, Ghana. He studied Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. His works predominantly include drawings, texts and photography, which are narratives constructed from preoccupations including death, fear, war and memory and narratives that are often overlooked or forgotten.

Themes of colonial and post-colonial history, restitution, and restoration recur throughout his practice, which extends across drawings and large-scale public murals. These works act as portals for immersive dialogues and layered interpretations of history.