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14 October – 20 December 2025
|London
Rita Mawuena Benissan: The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold
Gallery 1957 presents The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold, the debut London solo exhibition by Rita Mawuena Benissan. Known for her material and research-based explorations of Ghanaian heritage, Benissan reclaims colonial photographic archives.
Date & Location
14 October – 20 December 2025
London, 1 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, London SW7 5EW, UK
About the event
Free Admission.
In this new body of work, Benissan revisits late 19th and early 20th-century portraits of Ghanaian royals and citizens, transforming monochrome colonial imagery into vibrant expressions of dignity and sovereignty. Through acts of recolouring, embroidery, and recontextualisation, she symbolically returns presence and power to figures once frozen under the colonial gaze.
Set within the Victorian setting of Gallery 1957’s London space, the exhibition becomes a speculative archive, a reversal of empire’s visual order. The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold invites viewers to reimagine history through a Ghanaian lens, where gold, memory, and identity converge to illuminate what was always there, now seen in full colour.