TrAIN Open Lecture (online): Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

On blaxTARLINES and Non-Orientable Recipes  

blaxTARLINES KUMASI is one of six “Schools” invited for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh (May 9 – November 22, 2026). In this presentation, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh—member of blaxTARLINES and co-curator of the coalition’s exhibition at Biennale Arte 2026 titled Slow Down: Cattle Battle Ahead—provides insights into the muses, thematic registers, and curatorial models explored for the Venice exhibition. The “Minor keys” served as an invitation from Koyo Kouoh and her team of curators to reflect on the condition of the “universal exception,” that which belongs but is repressed or excluded, and also that which is included in our representations but does not belong in actual existence. Granted so, we are beckoned to engage in practicing universal politics from this position of fugitivity (a politics of self-inclusion on the bases of multiplicity and preemptive equality). It is this conceptual, speculative, and political framework that informed the staging of blaxxRADIO, blaxxMEDIA, and blaxxLIBRARY as open-source portals that encapsulate the complexity of collective mobilization already operative in how the blaxTARLINES community works.  

Bio:  

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Ph.D., is a curator, critic, and educator based in Kumasi, Ghana. He belongs to the blaxTARLINES KUMASI coalition of co-workers—the open-source collective and art-labour movement nested in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). His work intersects pedagogy, criticism, curating, and art. Ohene-Ayeh has [co-]curated blaxTARLINES KUMASI's exhibition at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh (2026);  Fragments of A World After Its Own Image (2025) at APALAZZOGALLERY (Italy); TRANSFER(S), Ibrahim Mahama’s site-oriented research and exhibition project in Germany and Ghana (2023); the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography (2019-2020) in Mali; Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (A Retrospective of Agyeman Ossei ‘Dota’) (2020-2021) in Ghana; and the 35th edition of the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale with Exit Frame Collective (2023-2024) in Slovenia. Ohene-Ayeh presently teaches at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST. His current research observes the exhibition as a pedagogical situation while positing the curator as a "self-subverting authority". 

 Photo of Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh © Owusu K. Gyam

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