Behind the Scenes with Adora Mba: Ghana’s Art Scene Development: A Case Study of an emerging diaspora scene to the global Art market

Yuval Aluf

Courtesy of Adora Mba

I first met Adora Mba on a grey November morning at a quiet café off Ladbroke Grove. Our conversation quickly moved beyond Ghana’s recent visibility in the global art world toward the deeper cultural and structural shifts that shaped it from within.

When Adora moved to Accra, Ghana, a decade ago, the artists were already there but the infrastructure wasn’t. Only one gallery, Gallery 1957, and one foundation, Nubuke were exhibiting local artists. Still, "the talent in Accra was enormous. These artists had nowhere to show, so they left.” Rather than simply accommodating existing artists, Mba actively wanted to promote and structure artistic careers within a global framework.

Growing up between London, Nigeria, and Ghana, she understood both the mechanics of the international art market and the lived realities of the region. Instead of joining established art scenes in Lagos, London, or New York, she chose to invert the pattern: to build something global in Ghana. “It was never going to be a Ghanaian gallery,” she says. “It was going to be a global gallery in Ghana.” ADA Contemporary became that experiment.

Courtesy of ADA Contemporary, Accra, Ghana

Rather than smoothing West African narratives to fit Western expectations of “African art,” Mba positioned the gallery around artistic calibre and vision. By “smoothing,” she refers to the tendency of Western institutions to favour easily legible themes of identity, heritage, or recognisable figurative tropes often at the expense of complexity, experimentation, or abstraction that resists preconceived ideas of African art. “The technique had to be exceptional, the narrative strong,” she explains. “You had to feel you were seeing something entirely new.” Her position both local and international allowed her to operate as a translator rather than a gatekeeper.

The gallery’s first home was in Villagio, a mixed-use development in Accra with cafés, clubs, and steady foot traffic. ADA was visually polished yet deliberately porous. Framed by large glass windows, the space invited passersby to look in, allowing the everyday movement of the city to enter the gallery itself. “Any Ghanaian could see the art,” Mba stresses. “I wanted people to see themselves in the work to understand that art isn’t for a closed group.”

The programme centred on a small group of artists whose work travelled not because it conformed to market trends, but because it held its own wherever it went. Medium mattered less than integrity. Artists such as Eniwaye Oluwaseyi and Emma Prempeh were among those represented by ADA in its early years, later gaining international visibility through exhibitions, fairs, and institutional attention. While ADA represented artists from across West Africa and the diaspora, Ghanaian artists formed a central part of the programme, reflecting Mba’s commitment to building a local ecosystem. What unified the programme was not geography, but the seriousness of practice.

Even at its most visible, however, the ecosystem remained precarious. Essentials such as specialist shipping and conservation were often handled on an ad-hoc basis. Mba’s experience underscores a truth frequently obscured by the sheen of the global art world: building cultural infrastructure is slow, resource-intensive work that depends on resilience as much as vision. What Ghana needs now, she argues, are not more commercial white cubes, but foundations, residencies, and educational spaces places where artists can think, experiment, and grow without the pressure of immediate sales. “We don’t need more commercial galleries,” she says. “We need more spaces that nurture artists.” Without local institutions capable of historicising, contextualising, and sustaining artistic production, visibility risks becoming fleeting. “Until Ghanaians begin buying Ghanaian art,” she notes, “the system will always be fragile.”

For Mba, this is ultimately a question of authorship. Western institutions continue to separate “African art” into thematic categories a gesture that draws attention while reinforcing distance. “Visibility is not enough,” she insists. “We have visibility. What we need now is the ability to decide how the work is framed, discussed, and valued.” ADA, in this sense, was never simply a gallery. While it operated within a polished exhibition framework, it also functioned as a hybrid space: part exhibition platform, part informal educational environment, and part incubator for long-term artistic development in a context where formal curatorial and educational structures remain limited.

The transformation came quickly. “Suddenly, Ghana became the first place people landed,” Mba recalls. Curators and patrons from institutions such as the Tate, Serpentine, Guggenheim, and Centre Pompidou travelled to Accra often for the first time encountering artists and practices that had previously remained outside their institutional circuits. “The direction reversed,” she says. “It wasn’t us going to them. It was they coming to us.”

International fairs such as 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair further amplified visibility, but also exposed a persistent tension. The mechanisms that elevated African artists often did so by isolating them. “We were never allowed a seat at the table,” Mba observes, “so they built a separate table for us.” Her hope is for a future in which artists from Accra are understood simply as contemporary artists without the geographical prefix and without slipping back into invisibility. Auction houses shifting African artists into general contemporary departments is a move she welcomes cautiously. “It signals inclusion,” she notes, “but it also means competing globally. Only strong work survives that transition.”

This contradiction lies at the heart of Ghana’s current moment. Greater inclusion promises long-overdue parity, yet it also exposes artists to the full pressures of a global market shaped by Western institutions, collectors, and metrics of value. While integration can dismantle marginalisation, it risks reproducing hierarchies in which African artists must compete on terms not of their own making. For Mba, the challenge is not visibility itself, but ensuring that inclusion does not come at the cost of agency, context, or long-term sustainability.

Sustaining a commercial gallery in an emerging market ultimately risked overshadowing the structural work Mba saw as essential. After five intense years, she closed ADA’s physical space not as a retreat, but as a recalibration. Moving into independent advisory practice now allows her to support artists and institutions while remaining flexible, responsive, and focused on long-term ecosystem building rather than commercial cycles. Her advice to younger curators considering similar paths is clear: if the drive is community-led education, access, and visibility, a gallery can be transformative. If the motivation is ego or glamour, she urges restraint.

This shift in visibility also raises a new question: how can this momentum be sustained without recreating the same extractive structures commercial, institutional, and curatorial that once made migration a prerequisite for artistic success? The concern, Mba clarifies, is not that Ghana might become too successful, but that its success could be shaped by external demands rather than locally defined priorities, mirroring the very systems the scene initially sought to resist.

Courtesy of ADA Contemporary, Accra, Ghana

As the scene enters a new phase shaped by independent curators, advisory practices, and temporary exhibition models a different figure comes into focus: the nomadic curator, a role distinct from the independent curator in its emphasis on mobility, collaboration, and context-specific engagement. Unlike independent curators who may still align with fixed institutions or recurring programmes, the nomadic curator moves between contexts, responding to local conditions rather than imposing a single curatorial framework. In emerging ecosystems such as Ghana’s, this flexibility allows curatorial practice to grow alongside infrastructure rather than ahead of it.

As these frameworks take shape, the language of the art world is also beginning to shift. The category of “African contemporary art,” once both enabling and limiting, is gradually giving way to a more integrated understanding of contemporary art itself. If that transition continues without erasing cultural specificity the coming decade may mark not only the consolidation of Ghana’s art infrastructure, but its recognition as a genuine centre of global art.