Loft Art Gallery presents What We Carry, an exhibition by Ghanaian artists Kwaku Yaro and James Mishio, opening on 28 October 2026 at the gallery’s Marrakech space. Bringing together new works developed during their residency in Marrakech, the exhibition marks the culmination of a period of research, experimentation and exchange between Morocco and Ghana.
Developed around a curatorial thread connecting Accra and Marrakech, What We Carry explores the stories carried by everyday materials and the meanings they acquire as they move between bodies, communities and geographies. Through second-hand garments, woven materials and objects rooted in everyday life, Yaro and Mishio consider how materials can retain traces of individual and collective experience, while acquiring new meanings through movement, reuse and transformation.
For James Mishio, this research connects Ghana’s culture of second-hand clothing and the world of Kantamanto, Accra’s emblematic second-hand clothing market, with Morocco’s own relationship with l’bal and the textile economy of its souks. Working across pastel, oil, acrylic and fabric on canvas, Mishio incorporates fragments of second-hand garments into his painted compositions. The fabric does not remain confined to the clothing of his figures: it extends beyond the body, moving into backgrounds and unexpected areas of the canvas and claiming spaces that were not initially assigned to it. Through this gesture, Mishio explores what he describes as a “free world”: not a utopia, but an opening in which new possibilities can emerge. His time in Marrakech has also led him to reconsider more broadly his relationship to space, material and perception.
For Kwaku Yaro, material is similarly inseparable from memory, community and lived experience. His practice is deeply informed by his childhood in Ghana, where he grew up with the conviction that the individual is shaped within a wider community. Everyday materials have become central to his artistic language as he has sought to develop a practice rooted in his own identity and experience.
Yaro’s relationship to these materials is also connected to his family history. His mother worked as a food trader and regularly visited local markets, environments through which many of the materials he would later incorporate into his practice first became familiar to him. By repositioning everyday materials, often overlooked or considered ordinary, within his work, Yaro seeks to give them renewed identity and meaning, while inviting viewers to reconsider how they perceive and value them.
During his residency in Marrakech, he extended this reflection by considering how woven materials take on different functions and meanings across communities and countries. His encounters with traditional Moroccan rugs led him to study their origins, uses and histories before incorporating them into his own artistic language.