Again, but differently, Gandor Collins’ exhibition through a sustainability lens

On the 5th and 6th of September 2024, Gandor Collins, Absa L’Atelier 2022 Ambassador, presented his solo exhibition Again but Differently at the Mix Design Hub in Accra.

The event brought together artists, friends, colleagues, and dignitaries, including celebrated Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama.

The Absa L’Atelier is one of Africa’s most prestigious art competitions, founded in 1986 to support and showcase emerging African talent.

Sponsored by Absa in partnership with the South African National Association for the Visual Arts, the competition has become a launchpad for artists across the continent, offering residencies, exhibitions, and international exposure. It is a platform that connects African voices to global art discourses.

As the 2022 Ambassador, Gandor Collins embodies this legacy, using his practice to explore themes of memory, restitution, and resilience while engaging urgent conversations about sustainability and cultural survival.

At first glance, Collins’ works appear to grapple primarily with memory, history, and cultural identity. Yet, viewed through the lens of sustainability and climate consciousness, his pieces also reveal pressing environmental narratives: the costs of extractive economies, the weight of textile waste, and the fragile interplay between consumption and resilience.

Resource Exploitation and Environmental Reckoning

In Unison of Heavy Hearts, Collins draws on Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” to depict a woman resting on stacked vintage televisions, surrounded by drones and scattered gold nuggets. While the work speaks to exploitation and surveillance, it also resonates deeply with the climate story of Ghana.

The scattered gold recalls the nation’s resource wealth while hinting at the destructive legacy of mining that has polluted rivers, degraded lands, and displaced communities. Here, Collins highlights the paradox of abundance: natural resources that sustain economies but often leave behind ecological ruin.

Waste, Consumption, and the Urgency of Reclamation

Few pieces confront sustainability as directly as Choco Vanilla. Constructed from denim sourced from Ghana’s second-hand clothing markets, the work is both urgent and poetic. Ghana is one of the largest recipients of discarded textiles from the Global North, a system that burdens local markets and generates mountains of waste.

Collins transforms these remnants into woven art, creating what he calls “waste trapping.” In doing so, he shifts the narrative from refusal to resilience, urging us to reconsider waste not as an endpoint, but as a site of reimagination.

The piece embodies the cyclical nature of consumption and hints at ecological futures where discarded matter becomes a vessel of memory and continuity.

Climate Apathy and Digital Noise

In Eyes on the Hill, a figure crowned with a colonial-era ceremonial cap sits tethered to history and displacement. At the bottom corner of the canvas, however, a vintage television disrupts the solemnity. Its screen broadcasts ecological devastation, land stripped bare, and waters poisoned, yet it is juxtaposed with the irony of a viral meme.

This tension mirrors our contemporary struggle: the trivialization of climate collapse within the spectacle of digital culture. Collins forces us to confront how climate disasters are consumed not as urgent calls to action but as fleeting content, quickly buried in the endless scroll.

Economic Shocks and Hidden Vulnerabilities

Kanta Drip reflects the collapse of a young woman’s livelihood during Ghana’s currency redenomination. While rooted in an economic narrative, the piece echoes the climate economy’s volatility.

Just as sudden shifts in policy or global markets can destabilize lives, climate shocks, droughts, floods, and food price spikes often weigh heaviest on the most vulnerable. Collins’ canvas becomes a metaphor for how hidden costs accumulate, eroding resilience at both personal and societal levels.

Towards Healing and Ecological Futures

Across his body of work, Gandor Collins does not present climate issues in isolation. Instead, he threads them into broader questions of memory, restitution, and survival. His art reminds us that climate change is not just about rising seas or hotter days; it is about the stories we carry, the waste we inherit, and the futures we imagine.

Again but Differently urges us to ask: What does it mean to reclaim identity in a world where both people and ecosystems are under siege? How can what is wasted be transformed into possibility? And how might healing personal, cultural, and ecological become a shared project of reclamation?

In bridging fragments of the past with the crises of the present, Collins offers not just critique, but hope. His art challenges us to look again, but differently, at the tangled intersections of culture, consumption, and climate.

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