Hope Is the Thing With Feathers
Curated by Sakhile Matlhare and Daniel Hagemeier
Borrowing its title from Emily Dickinson's poem, Hope Is the Thing With Feathers framed hope as something fragile and transitional — a state suspended between what has passed and what is yet to come. Bringing together six artistic positions of the African diaspora living and working in Germany, the exhibition deliberately resisted any singular notion of "African art," foregrounding distinct individual voices and the themes of memory, migration, and resilience that move between them, across painting, photography, textiles, and performance.
Within this constellation, Nando Nkrumah's contribution approached hope not as passive sentiment but as an active, generative force. His work reflects on the lives of his Ghanaian grandmother and great-grandmother — drawing on their stories of care, faith, and perseverance as a lens through which to understand hope as something practised and passed down across generations. Working across painting and clay, Nkrumah uses memory and imagination to make diasporic experience visible in both its lived and its envisioned forms, giving shape to futures summoned into the present rather than merely awaited. Clay sculpting forms an integral part of this process, and the resulting sculptures were shown alongside the paintings — proposing the imagination itself as an instrument of endurance: a means of authoring one's own becoming and of bearing witness to histories and possibilities that dominant narratives leave unrecorded.
