Artist Development Workshop

What does it mean to develop as an artist without access to formal art education, institutional support, or a network that sees your work in a global context? This five-day workshop was built around that question — designed not around a single artistic output, but around the artists themselves: their identity, their practice, and their collective future.

Working with emerging and established artists from Northern Ghana, the workshop moved through portfolio development, artist statement writing, and individual two-to-three year planning, alongside an introduction to local and international art opportunities and discourses. Daily art labs — led by Sandro Masai (performance art and decolonial methods), Bright Ackwerh (political satire and storytelling), and Ernest Sackitey (documentation and cyanotype printing) — ensured that critical reflection was always grounded in making. A "Going to Town" exercise sent artists into Tamale itself as a site of research and image-making, with the resulting cyanotype works feeding directly into the closing exhibition at Nuku Studio.

The process culminated in a public exhibition at NUKU Studio, and a collective visioning session for the network — resulting in the formal establishment of the Northern Collective of Artists (NOCA).