Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku

Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku is a civil engineer and an artist. He works with second-hand clothing from Kantamanto market in Accra and from the landfills and beaches where it ends up. He dyes the fabric, layers it with paint and chalk and builds it into reliefs and installations. His grandmother, a Queen Mother with a large collection of textiles, taught him that what we wear tells others who we are.

His projects include Spaces and Sounds I (2020), Butterflies on a Parched Land (2022) and the solo museum exhibition Cross-Sections of a Thousand Lives at the Institute Museum of Ghana (2024). Since 2020 he has been building How to Heal a Broken World, a ribbon of discarded clothes that grows at every place it visits. We are his partner in Europe.