Challenging Gender Clichés // Defining New Identities

What does it mean to be a young woman or man in Northern Ghana today? And how can art become a tool for questioning the cultural expectations that shape those answers? These were the driving questions behind a multi-site street art and community arts programme bringing together 25 young artists from Savelugu and Karaga to explore, interpret, and challenge the gender clichés embedded in their communities.

The process began with a joint preparation workshop at Red Clay Studio in Tamale, where artists from both districts came together to develop a shared curatorial framework, identify sub-themes, and sketch their artistic responses. Working with paste-up and mural techniques, the group then took to the streets of Tamale for a joint public street art event — transforming wood structures into a collective visual intervention on gender, identity, and possibility, in collaboration with artist Phuc Van Dang.

From there the project moved outward into the communities themselves. Live mural paintings were created directly onto the walls of the youth centres in Karaga and Savelugu — public, permanent works made in dialogue with the spaces and the people who use them. Each site also hosted a local arts festival combining poetry, spoken word, performance, cultural music, and dance, opening the conversation about gender identity to a wider community audience.

The curatorial approach throughout was rooted in participation and local ownership: artists moved from workshop to public intervention to community event, building both individual artistic voice and collective civic engagement. The result was not a single exhibition but a distributed, living set of artworks and conversations embedded in the fabric of three communities.