What If We Love & Protect Each Other

An exhibition of resistance, remembrance, and care

In traditional Ghanaian society, hospitality was paramount. Strangers were welcomed as family, offered refuge, and invited to share meals. Similarly, individuals with non-binary identities - Kojo besia, Obaberima, Nyanyo, and Nyornugbeme - were embraced and integrated into families with love and joy.

This history reflects core Ghanaian family values: love, acceptance, hospitality, tolerance, compassion, kindness, and care. What has caused these fundamental values to shift?

The past few years have been among the most difficult for Ghana’s queer community. Unlawful arrests and detentions, kidnappings, public shaming and violence from family, clergy, and the state have left many isolated or in hiding.

But Ghana is not alone.

Across Africa in Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa and around the world, queer lives are increasingly vulnerable to criminalisation and censorship, often shaped by complex forces of morality, nationalism, and societal control. From anti-gay legislation in East Africa to the rollback of trans rights in the United States, queer communities face interconnected threats rooted in colonial legacies, religious dogma, and global systems of capital and power.

Yet even in the face of this, queer people have continued to build joy, kinship, and resistance in art, music, protest, and quiet care.

Rooted in a nexus of mutualism, W’AHU, in collaboration with the Digital Archive Project (DAP) and perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR), brings together archival traces and contemporary artistic interventions. These works take back what was lost, rethink what we’ve been told, and remind us there are many ways to be queer.

ARCHIVAL INSTALLATION

Naa Nuerkie opens this journey with a tender ritual of memory. Through scrap textiles and fabric fragments, she weaves together a patchwork of identities that details pIAR’s histories of collaboration, creation and joy. Her installation offers a space to sit, listen, and honour the supporting structures that are often left unseen.

MS NAA’S WORK

Baahwa’s scrolls continue this invitation to stillness. Her works do not speak loudly; they whisper. Through intimate mark-making, she creates space for connection, healing, and ancestral knowledge. Visitors can leave a trace, contribute a note, and remember together. Her practice is a gentle refusal of erasure, offering a quiet place to belong. 

BAAHWA’S WORK

Essel’s multimedia installation is a living archive, a growing record of queer presence built from both personal and collective memory. Drawing from materials in the DAP and pIAR archives, her work asks: How do we create room for ourselves in a world that denies us space? How do we remember when forgetting is enforced?

ESSEL’S WORK

Ato answers with sound: a 7-track sonic ritual rooted in his album LGBTQ+ Africa. Through Afro-rhythms, poetry, and spiritual textures, his piece reclaims African queer identity as sacred. Confronting stigma, colonial shame, and silence, it invites visitors to speak back, to write their truths on the wall, and to ask themselves: Who would you be if you were never told to hide?

ATO’S WORK

Eden’s tufted textile works close this loop of care. Soft, vibrant, and deeply personal, they honour the quiet intimacies of queer life: chosen family, survival, and the small rituals that keep us going. Eden only asks that we stand in front of the work and feel something: comfort, recognition, the quiet knowledge that we are not alone.

EDEN’S WORK

Together, these works create a sanctuary and a proposition. They hold space for grief and joy, mourning and memory, resistance and rest. They ask us to imagine what becomes possible when we choose, again and again, to love and protect each other.

Just as a stranger is welcomed to a home with food and water, this exhibition welcomes all who seek kinship, truth, and care.

NB: DAP would like to acknowledge Free Forever Collective/Ballroom GH for contributing some images to the exhibition.