“Contemporary Craft: Kobina Adusah”, on view at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) from 27 November 2026 to 25 April 2027, is the first solo museum exhibition devoted to the Ghanaian ceramic artist Kobina Adusah (b. 1999 in Sekondi, Ghana) and his first solo show in Germany. A new series that Adusah is currently working on forms the focus of the exhibition. The artist achieved international recognition in 2025 when he was nominated for the prestigious LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize.
Adusah creates monumental vessels, in most cases from unglazed, natural clay. He builds up his sculptures layer by layer, using slabs of clay that he bends and assembles into large-scale volumes. The artist describes this process as a dialogue with the material. For Adusah, clay is more than just a working medium: coming straight from the earth, it serves as a carrier of touch and memory. Adusah’s works are based on the idea that every human being leaves behind traces imprinted in the earth. His vessels thus serve as containers for the invisible as well as places of remembrance.
The surfaces of the vessels are covered with a dense web of symbols of the artist’s own invention. They resemble a form of writing, imbued with their own rhythmic structure and logic, yet they cannot be deciphered. His carved patterns are based on a personal experience: as a child, Adusah helped his mother, a seamstress, to sew on buttons. He now incorporates this repetitive, meditative motion of sewing into his work.
The exhibition design draws on the enigmatic quality of Adusah’s works to transform the space into an archaeological site of the future. Numerous objects are assembled on a large, well-lit laboratory table. Various video clips illustrate how the objects are created in Adusah’s studio in Kumasi. The exhibition was developed across continents, in collaboration with the artist in Kumasi and Gallery FUMI in London.
In this fifth exhibition in the “Contemporary Craft” series, initiated in 2022, the MK&G is expanding the perspective on international contemporary craft. Following solo exhibitions of the work of established artists such as Young-Jae Lee, Margit Jäschke, Hanne Friis, and Ernst Gamperl, the series now presents for the first time with Kobina Adusah an artist from the younger generation. The focus here is on an artistic practice that is rooted in Ghana while evolving within an international exhibition context. This broadens the series’ geographical scope and highlights the global context in which arts and crafts are produced, promoted and exhibited today.
The exhibition design is developed by Benjamin Unterluggauer.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Justus Brinckmann Society, the friends’ society of the MK&G.
