Jonathan Okoronkwo’s “Some things stay broken” took viewers from the white-cube gallery to the scrapyards and, in doing so, translated the artist’s earlier sculptures into paintings. In his 2021 exhibition “CONDEM, CONDEM, Kɔ Ntɛm!,” Okoronkwo made sculptural installations within the Aboabo Nima Moke scrapyard in Kumasi, Ghana. Left behind in the yard after the exhibition, the sculptures blended in with their surroundings.

The paintings in Okoronkwo’s recent show took inspiration from the mechanical objects found in another Kumasi scrapyard known as Suame Magazine. The walls of the gallery were