Annobil Contemporary was founded by Ishmael Fiif Annobil, the Ghanaian poet, multi-award-winning filmmaker, art critic, photographer, emblemist, drummer and digital composer. The gallery is dedicated to celebrating artistic genius across borders, and updating the role of Africa on the international art scene, from that of supplier of art to the outside world, to that of a centre for international exposition. Through this strategy, the founder challenges the hackneyed definitions of African art which continue to distort its meaning to this day.
Crucially Annobil Contemporary springboards new artistic talent.
It is a space for serious artistic enquiry, interrogation, innovation and to a large extent a laboratory for expeditionary connection and exposition. It is therefore non-conventional in every way, in its quest to nurture new talent in all art forms and genres, while celebrating modernist and post-modernist greats of all cultures, known or unknown.
Annobil Contemporary is possibly the only gallery in Ghana to place functional and craft art on equal footing for regular fine art, and to throw light on the conceptual excellence at the heart of making things. This includes updating critical analysis around craft art that was once deemed vernacular.
Set around the upmarket Trasacco Area, Annobil Contemporary incorporates Obsidian Tavern, a bohemian watering hole that doubles as a second art gallery.
Annobil Contemporary boasts two joint curators, namely founder Ishmael Annobil and world renowned Ghanaian artist Kofi Setordji. They were classmates in high school with a long history of collaboration in art and sports since then. Kofi curates African and Global South art and International Sculpture, while Ishmael curates Diasporan, Western and Eastern, and Photographic art. Ishmael emigrated in the early eighties, living in East Africa and the United Kingdom, opting for the world of letters where he has a keen advantage, subsequently developing a surefooted career as an art critique, groundbreaking publisher, and multi-award winning filmmaker specialising in artist documentaries (see biog below). For his part, Kofi stayed on in Ghana and formulated a strategy for his personal (and Ghana’s) evolution and his breakthrough as an artist (see biog below)Ishmael and Kofi are essentially joint creative directors of Annobil Contemporary.
Ishmael Fiifi Ayerebi Annobil is a Ghanaian poet, journalist/critic, multi-award winning filmmaker, photographer, artist, emblemist, and digital composer. He was born in 1958, in Accra, Ghana, where he started writing poetry at the age of eleven, and entered journalism soon after high school. He has lived in the Sudan and Kenya, where he performed his acclaimed recital for the homeless and landless, Criers on The Thresholds of Reality (Nairobi 1983), and worked as a reporter, before moving to England as a correspondent, in the same year. In 1987, he moved with his family to Wales, where he founded the international poetry festival, Festival Iolo (formerly Iolo’s Children), and Wales’ first serious arts newspaper, Circa21. He is the founder of online arts journal Chiaroscuro Magazine, and the celebrated London film collective, Stonedog Productions (London).
Annobil’s film practice has centred on artists and art practices, starting in 2007 with his seminal film In The Presence of Awe – The Transvangarde (art documentary), Kenji Yoshida – Artist of the Soul (art documentary), Salamander Walks (a surreal feature), Hornsleth: Product of Love (documentary). In the last ten years, his practice has been dominated by his highly prolific collaborations with American minimalist Linda Karshan, including the multi-award winning Linda Karshan: Covid-19 Conversation, Linda Karshan: Choreographing the Page (documentary), and Equilibrio a documentary about Linda Karshan’s groundbreaking Exhibition at Abazzia Di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The pair also founded the trailblazing new genre, Walked Drawing, enacting masterpieces in historical spaces and academia. In 2023 he co-directed with his daughter Nana Yaa the award winning film, Insomnia, about his night photography of London, based on the eponymous monograph.
Annobil has published two other books of poetry, Ethiop and Bardo: Parable of Tomorrow, and one music album, Zingliwu. His forthcoming books include Portrait of a Man in Pain (novel), and Inklings of Clay (historical novella). He is the creator of Abëtëi, a body of philosophical emblems for the Gadangme people of Ghana, which he views as his greatest achievement. A master photographer, his images have been published in various publications, including The Independent Newspaper, and prestigious French magazine M3. Annobil attended Christian Methodist Secondary School (Accra, Ghana), studied Social Anthropology extramurally at Goldsmith’s College, and undertook a PgDip in Visual Communications at West Herts College. He now lives in Ghana.
Kofi Setordji (born 1957) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Ghana. His works range from graphic design, textile designing, sculpture and painting. Setordji was born in 1957 in Accra. He attended Methodist Secondary School, in Accra , where he received his seminal training from charismatic art teacher Mr. Abaka, benefiting from the school’s well-resourced studio. After high school, Kofi trained as a commercial artist, and set up his own graphic arts studio in the traditional inner city, utilising the revenue to hone out fund his fine art practice. He subsequently apprenticed with Ghanaian cartoonist and fine art educator Ghanatta Yaw Boakye, followed in 1984 to 1987 by a prestigious apprenticeship with iconic Ghanaian artist and dramatist Saka Acquaye.
He started working in sandstone in 1985 and started showing his works in Accra. He has since shown in France, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Austria, South Africa and the United States. He has carried out important public commissions, including the iconic Entre Amies, a five-meter his sculpture outside the National Theatre of Ghana, Accra. His international renown can be traced back to his audacious installation work, Genocide, inspired by the Rwanda Genocide of 1994.
Apart from his artistic practice, Kofi is a mentor to many young contemporary artists practicing in Accra through is Arthaus, residency program for artists. Setordji won the Leisure Award Sculptor of the Year prize in 1990. In 2008, he received the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, alongside Mona Hatoum, and Shahzia Sikander. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Nubuke Foundation in 2012.
Annobil Contemporary represents a shift in the ‘traditional’ Ghanaian approach to curating, as a purely in-house prerogative that subsumes all external influence. We encourage guest curatorship, be it through transactional or purely collaborative arrangements. This policy offers independent curators from all over the world the opportunity to show work at a prestigious gallery. This requires the associate curator found their own themes and raise funding, while benefitting from the gallery’s internal PR and management systems. We favour refined, courageous and innovative work and curation.
Interns are given substantial access to what goes on behind-the-scenes on any show, the selection process, the aesthetic reasoning as well as debates leading to the show, the packaging, public relations strategies and implementation, including interviews and audio visual recordings for press.
Internships are by application backed by a curator, artist or faculty leader. Selection depends on the prospective intern’s demonstrable grasp of the art history of any region, enthusiasm, and artistic ideology and vision.
We are poised to springboard the next generation of curators in Ghana and abroad. We welcome new and experienced curators that wish to immerse themselves in our cross-cultural curatorial ecology and ethos. Interns are also exposed especially to the Ghanaian/African aesthetic traditions, architypes, practitioners and processes.
Interns are given substantial access to what goes on behind-the-scenes on any show, the selection process, the aesthetic reasoning as well as debates leading to the show, the packaging, public relations strategies and implementation, including interviews and audio visual recordings for press.
Internships are by application backed by a curator, artist or faculty leader. Selection depends on the prospective intern’s demonstrable grasp of the art history of any region, enthusiasm, and artistic ideology and vision.
Overseas applicants are expected to contribute to the cost of their internship, though this requirement may be waived or mitigated by managerial consensus, if the applicant is considered to be exceptional and needy.