Cliché // Bridging Ghana's North–South Creative Divide

Northern Ghana is too often seen through the lens of others — reduced to a set of assumptions and images that flatten its complexity, its culture, and its creative life. Cliché was conceived as a direct challenge to that: a multidisciplinary art project bringing together artists from Tamale and Accra to collaborate, across the north–south divide, on new work that reframes the narrative.

The project united fourteen artists across disciplines — visual art, rap, spoken word, poetry, photography, videography, music, and illustration — in a structured creative process that moved from an initial artists' meetup in Tamale (September 2019) to an intensive collaborative workshop in Accra (February 2020). The collaborative themes — child empowerment, history, festival and folklore, and environmental futures — were developed by the artists themselves, with each group deciding the form and direction of their work.

The outcomes extended beyond individual artworks: Cliché established a lasting platform and network for creatives from Northern and Southern Ghana, grounded in the belief that genuine dialogue between artists produces something neither could make alone. Curated by @thisnobeart.