The Beyond
Now showing in Tamale, Ghana / Lagos, Nigeria — 2025–2026
The Beyond is an intergenerational journey through photography that explores the changing role of the camera across shifting social and technological conditions. It is also a spiritual story, a transatlantic story, and a window into ancestry and alternate realities.
This fall, The Beyond is part of two major African exhibitions:
- The Writing’s on the Wall — Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA Tamale, Ghana), Sept 13, 2025 – Mar 14, 2026
- Incarceration — LagosPhoto 2025 (Lagos, Nigeria), Oct 25 – Nov 6, 2025
“The Writing’s on the Wall” gathers women artists whose works read, rewrite, and reveal the coded messages of our time. Drawing from the biblical tale of Belshazzar’s feast, the exhibition explores prophecy, transformation, and authorship through the lens of feminine creation. Here, the ‘wall’ becomes a ‘womb’—a living membrane between the seen and unseen, where art is not a static display but a pulsing organism of signs, symbols, and ancestral voices. The exhibition invites viewers to move through layered worlds of becoming, unmaking, and renewal, reimagining what it means to see, to know, and to rise.
Our photography channels an ancestral and spiritual presence that feels both intimate and cosmic. Our collaboration across generations (Anna–Penny–Pierre) makes authorship feel fluid and collective, echoing the idea that creation often flows through us, not just from us.
Our work becomes a dialogue between continents and consciousness — showing how “African” ways of knowing (spiritual, symbolic, intuitive) can inform global art practices. We expand the exhibition’s argument: that women’s art from New York and Ghana share a language of transformation and sacred communication.
I call it the photo gene, but Robin Riskin has taken it Beyond.
Robin Riskin, who is a curator in Ghana, told us, “according to traditions I had encountered in West Africa, creative and conceptual powers resurrect across generations. For instance, when a healer dies, her spirit can return in any of the grandchildren; or when a chief passes, his spirit can be reborn in any of his bloodline.”
Robin sensed a collective force in our work as well, “a gravitational pull that runs through all of their picture planes. It is as if they are not authoring their art alone, but that Pierre—or whatever spirit was guiding Pierre—inhabits their shared vision.”
“Anna conjures universes that seem to transcend matter and dimensions. Her freedom with her medium was culled over generations, coming from a long line of photographers, painters, seamstresses, writers, musicians and collectors.”
“While we don’t have direct access to Pierre Gentieu’s person, we can read traces of him through his pictures and letters. These illuminate him as a humanist and man of deep principles, with a multi-disciplinary practice across drawing, painting, photography, philosophy, and literature.
“If we read Pierre’s pictures through his descendants Penny and Anna, we might notice almost mystical presences in his mostly realistic compositions. His pictures are permeated by an ethereal luminosity that parallels Anna and Penny’s alternate universes. What’s funny is that perhaps Pierre is their alternate universe-perhaps his spirit co-authors or contributes to their journey through photography. Perhaps they are all one author inhabiting different bodies, sharing a collective cosmic energy.”