IMAGINE. MATERIALISE. WITNESS.
africologne / Alte Feuerwache, Cologne
Curated by Yaël Koutouan, Amina Wolter, and Sakhile Matlhare
In IMAGINE. MATERIALISE. WITNESS., the artist Nando Nkrumah turns to drawing and painting as instruments of memory and dream. The works trace the territory between what has been lived and what has been imagined, giving form to diasporic experience in both its remembered and its envisioned states.
The exhibition's title names a sequence at the heart of Nkrumah's practice and of Authentism, the creative methodology he has developed over years of work: to imagine a reality not yet visible, to materialise it through the deliberate act of making, and to witness — to render it seen, and to insist that it be acknowledged. Understood this way, the triad is not only an artistic process but a practice of self-empowerment. To imagine one's own future, to give it material form in the present, and to reflect on it as something already taking shape is to claim authorship over one's own becoming — to treat the imagination as a tool for building reality rather than escaping it.
This temporal movement runs through the work: the future is not awaited but actively summoned into the present, where it can be examined, questioned, and refined. By bringing lived and dreamed diasporic experiences into view through this process, Nkrumah directly challenges the stereotypical media narratives that continue to frame migration today, displacing reductive imagery with a more layered and self-authored account.
In doing so, IMAGINE. MATERIALISE. WITNESS. proposes the imagination as evidence rather than escape — a means of bearing witness to histories and futures that dominant narratives leave unrecorded, and of empowering the self to shape both.
