From an early age, James Barnor, the nimble portraitist born in 1929 in Ghana, admired the way wedding photographers and police photographers alike commanded a scene. He apprenticed for a photographer cousin and eventually opened his own studio in Accra. Barnor highlighted “the fragmented experience of modernity and diaspora,” as curator Renée Mussai noted in an introductory text to the 2015 monograph James Barnor: Ever Young. The artist subtly harnessed the collective joy experienced in the wake of Ghana’s independence in 1957, as political consciousness and anticolonial movements swept the

In his exhibition “Surplus,” Omer Fast presented new and recent videos, drawings, and sculptures within domestic settings that appeared hastily abandoned. Arrangements of furniture, personal items, moving boxes, trash, and portrait busts covered with cherry pits (Cluster #2–#5, all 2020) created an ambience of transition and deterioration. Adding an eerie vibe, many of the artworks presented in these liminal spaces suggested that our increasingly connected and digitized world is haunted by specters.

An unmade bed surrounded by nearly empty bookshelves, open storage bins, a rumpled carpet, and