The World · Kobina Nyarko
Feeling the Ocean’s Voice
Filmed in Takoradi in 2024. Kobina paints from the shore where the nets now bring in plastic as well as fish.
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Theme 3
The World
Oceans, textiles and the planet we share. Take a breath and go down.
The ocean, the soil and the clothes we wear belong to one living system.
The artists in this theme live where the damage is visible: on the beaches of Takoradi and Cape Town and at Kantamanto market in Accra.
Kobina Nyarko paints from the shore where the nets bring in plastic with the fish. Michelle “Mishvania” Beattie builds sculptures from beach plastic. Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku sews the clothes the Global North throws away into one growing ribbon.
40 m · Takoradi, Ghana
Ocean’s Voice
Kobina Nyarko grew up by the sea in Takoradi and has painted its shoals for more than twenty years. Thousands of small strokes turn into movement on the canvas.
Film loop: Kobina Nyarko paints a shoal of fish on blue ground, stroke by stroke.
The film
When the last fish dies, the last man dies
200 m
Kobina Nyarko’s shoals spell out his warning. Keep scrolling: as more plastic sinks in, the fish can no longer hold the words.
400 m · Cape Coast, Ghana
How to Heal a Broken World
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku paints on discarded second-hand clothing, the clothes the Global North throws away. Songs of Summer is one of these works. In How to Heal a Broken World he sews the clothes into one growing ribbon that travels to castles and museums in Europe.
600 m · Cape Town, South Africa
Mermaids’ tears
Michelle “Mishvania” Beattie collects plastic on the beaches of Kommetjie and Scarborough and builds sculptures from it, unmelted and unchanged. “If I don’t show you, you will not see,” she says.
The artists
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Takoradi, Ghana · b. 1972
Kobina Nyarko
Kobina Nyarko grew up by the sea in Takoradi, and the sea has been his subject for more than twenty years.
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Cape Coast, Ghana · b. 1994
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku is a civil engineer and an artist.
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Cape Town, South Africa · grew up in Plettenberg Bay
Michelle “Mishvania” Beattie
As a child in Plettenberg Bay, Michelle Beattie collected small coloured beads on the beach and called them mermaids’ tears.
1,000 m
Down here, no light arrives
Below 1,000 metres the only light comes from the animals themselves. The plastic still arrives.
Exhibitions you can book
Concepts that are ready to travel to your headquarters, your stand or your public space.
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Oceans Voice
The World
A visual statement for the sea
Kobina Nyarko’s fish shoals and the plastic that now swims with them, shown with our film “Feeling the Ocean’s Voice”. Works by Michelle “Mishvania” Beattie and Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku join them.
For museums, companies with sustainability goals, schools and universities, public venues
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The Living Web
The World
Threads of land, sea and self
Textiles, beach plastic and ocean paintings by Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku, Michelle “Mishvania” Beattie and Kobina Nyarko. The exhibition follows how small everyday choices travel through land and sea.
For galleries, museums, educational institutions, organisations working on the environment
Bring this theme to your place
Most projects start with a conversation. Tell us about the space and the people you want to reach.