In Dubai, Efie Gallery Is Rewriting the Map of Contemporary African Art
“A lot of our artists are happy that we represent them because we are the same. As Africans, we understand what story they are telling and who they are talking to,” Kwame Mintah, Ghanaian cultural entrepreneur, collector and cofounder of Dubai-based contemporary gallery Efie, tells Observer. “There can be a disconnect between the person selling and what is being sold.” In 2021, Kwame, his brother Kobi and their mother, Valentina, opened Efie with the goal of supporting and showcasing the work of artists from Africa and its diaspora in the Middle East. Since then, they’ve extended the remit. “Often, what it meant to be a global artist was you exhibited in New York… the Middle East was almost ignored,” he says. “Even for our major artists—Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, El Anatsui and Abdoulaye Konaté—this is a new region unlocked for them. Then for the younger artists, the moment they exhibit their work here, they become international artists.”
Efie Gallery hosted the debut Middle East solo exhibitions of renowned Afro-Cuban multidisciplinary artist Campos-Pons and Malian icon Konaté in April 2025 and October 2024, respectively. The gallery hosted Anatsui’s first Dubai solo in March 2020 and also the first gallery show dedicated to the work of pioneering Ghanaian photographer J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije (1899-1989) in December 2023. Efie Gallery also represents London-based Nigerian artist Slawn, Ghanaian artist Yaw Owusu, Kenyan sculptor Maggie Otieno and Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh, whose solo show is on view through April 5.
Starting a gallery was not necessarily something Kwame planned on doing. It happened inadvertently after the Mintah family was invited to participate in the All Africa Festival, an annual event celebrating all things from the continent including fashion, music, food, film and photography. Kwame and Kobi considered exhibiting rare vinyl records from around the world—pieces they had been collecting for years—before expanding the idea to include a visual art exhibition as part of the festival.
In October 2021, a show curated by the brothers with Afia Owusua Afriyie opened at the Burj Plaza by Emaar in a site-specific pavilion designed by Ghanaian architect Alice Asafu-Adjaye, featuring work by Anatsui, Owusu, Otieno, Slawn, Betty Acquah, Isshaq Ismail, Larry Otoo, Theresah Ankomah, Chrissa Amuah, Kwaku Yaro and James Barnor. The show was well-received and extended beyond its initially scheduled three days, and that success inspired the family to open a gallery. Efie means home in the Ghanaian language, and the Mintah family did discuss opening in Ghana, where they founded e-Ananse, a library focused on African literature that also hosts live literary events in East Legon and Accra Central. They ultimately opted for Dubai instead, citing the region’s potential to raise the profile and expand the practice of both established and emerging artists. It was also an opportunity to foster cross-cultural exchange and highlight shared values—such as the idea of community—that exist between Africa and the Middle East.
Efie Gallery opened a permanent space in March 2022 at Al Khayat Avenue, an artistic hub, and roughly three years later relocated to a new two-story, 4,400-square-foot space that includes a 1,500-square-foot main exhibition area on the ground floor with 30-foot-high ceilings for large-scale work in Alserkal Avenue, an art and culture district. The gallery has grown into a leading institution representing and supporting contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, with programming that includes exhibitions, a residency program, art fair participation and the Rekord Gallery, which displays thousands of vinyl and shellac records dating from the 1940s to the present, collected by Kwame and Kobi. The space also hosts film screenings of movies from Africa in collaboration with Bootleg Griot, an independent public library project, alongside a library and cafe.
The Mintah family collects art, initially “more from a passion,” with a focus on Ghanaian legends such as James Barnor and Ablade Glover. The collection has since expanded considerably to include work by artists from across the African continent and its diaspora—among them African American and Black British artists—which “aligned with who we are,” says Kwame, in keeping with the gallery’s goal “to expand what people see as African art.”
Kwame and Kobi also collect vinyl. Several years before starting Efie Gallery, they planned to launch a reissue label called Efie Records, with the intention of making old albums by African artists and bands—among them Nana Kwame Ampadu, Opambuo International Band and A.B. Crentsil—available on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. With their mother’s support, the brothers secured a deal with Crentsil’s Super Sweet Talks International. But the murky world of music rights and licensing, particularly for bands and deceased artists, forced them to put that dream on hold. “We were young at the time and we realized that it’s a whole different beast,” recalls Kwame. “We said ‘okay, we don’t really want to go down that route’ so we almost parked that idea but we had still amassed quite a big collection of vinyl records.”
In 2017, Kobi bought a reissue of a record by Ghanaian highlife legend Ebo Taylor, which marked the beginning of the brothers’ journey into vinyl collecting. About two years later, Kwame heard the Afro-funk record “Only You” by pioneering Nigerian singer-songwriter Steve Monite at a friend’s house and assumed it was by an American artist. “When I heard this song, ‘I was like, what is this?… so I started researching. And I was like, ‘okay, how can I get these songs?… That instantly opened my mind to what exists out there especially from the African continent. That’s what started the vinyl collecting journey.” Over roughly seven years, the brothers collected more than 2,000 vinyl records, the majority by artists from Africa.
Efie Gallery’s recent exhibition “The Shape of Things to Come,” curated by Japan-based American curator Dexter Wimberly, included work by Americans Carrie Mae Weems and Adam Pendleton. “We were very purposeful in our action of presenting African American artists as African, in presenting Egyptian artists as African, in presenting Black British artists as African because we really want to make sure that people understand how large Africa is as a continent and how impactful we are. Often when people say African artists are new, they neglect that African artists have been a part of the story forever,” says Kwame, who sits on the Tate Africa Acquisitions Board. “We really want to help change that narrative and people’s mindset on what African art is and expand the genre so African artists can be as audacious or as risk-taking as their counterparts.”
Up next at Efie Gallery’s Dubai space is “In Abstracto, In Concreto,” curated by Brice Arsène Yonkeu, framing contemporary practices that expand both figuration and abstraction. Scheduled to open on May 21, the exhibition will feature paintings and works on paper by Lagos-born, U.S.-based Luke Agada; London-born, New York-based Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones; Cameroonian-born, U.S.-based artist Ludovic Nkoth; and New York- and Accra-based Gabonese artist Naila Opiangah.
The gallery will participate in this year’s Art Dubai (now postponed to mid-May) with a group presentation featuring work by Abdoulaye Konaté, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Yaw Owusu, Maggie Otieno, Aida Muluneh, Samuel Fosso and Kelani Abass. A body of work by Campos-Pons, as one of the highlight artists handpicked by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, will be on view at the Giardini as part of this year’s Venice Biennale. “We want to continue to uplift our artists. If an artist says they are represented by Efie Gallery, we want that to mean something both in the way we support them and also from a creative space,” says Kwame. “And almost like a stamp of approval from a collector, you don’t even have to see the work of an artist represented by the gallery; you know that you are going to get quality work.”
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