Ever So Present II: Between Home and Elsewhere – Group Show

Gagosian announces Ever So Present II: Between Home and Elsewhere, a group exhibition at Park & 75, New York, featuring work by Luke Agada, Amoako Boafo, Josèfa Ntjam, and Emma Prempeh. Opening on June 25, 2025, it forms the second part of Ever So Present, which opened last December at dot.ateliers, the artists’ residency program in Accra founded by Boafo in 2022. Ever So Present II is curated by Brice Arsène Yonkeu—the first curator invited to dot. ateliers’s new residency program for curators, filmmakers, and writers—and brings together four artists of African descent who engage with the formation of the contemporary diasporic self. On Thursday, June 26, at 6pm, the gallery will host a public conversation between Yonkeu, Agada, and Prempeh.

The 2024 iteration of Ever So Present explored the relationship between dislocation and creative exchange through the practices of that year’s dot.ateliers’s artists-in-residence, whose contributions made direct reference to Accra. Ever So Present II expands this inquiry through work that examines how displacement shapes identity, and cultural ancestry informs emergent realities within a postcolonial context influenced by globalization. The artists assembled by Yonkeu respond to a world in which, for some, belonging remains tied to birthplace, while for others, intergenerational narratives of migration remain a primary force.

In his painting The Things That Stayed (2025), Agada considers the residues of personal and collective memory that remain after migration, dislocation, and reconstruction. Employing a palette evocative of his native Lagos, Nigeria, he conjures forms that embody the tension between memory, thought, and experience by selectively fusing the emphases and techniques of automatism, Surrealism, and gestural expressionism.

A further expansion of traditional figure painting, Boafo’s Don’t You Miss Me Already (2025) depicts a Black woman in intricate lace clothing, her arms spread in an open embrace that evokes religious iconography, and her gaze conveying unflinching self-assurance. Boafo reinforces his subject’s defiant sense of belonging to multiple worlds while maintaining intimacy by tracing her figure directly with his fingertips.

Ntjam draws the raw material for her complex photomontages from online, photographic, and printed sources, juxtaposing diverse images to deconstruct hegemonic discourses of origin and race. In Nsaku Ne Vunda (2025), she gathers a far-flung group of historical figures including Manuel Antonio Nsaku Ne Vunda (spiritual envoy and first African ambassador to the Vatican), Harriet Tubman (abolitionist and freedom strategist), and Henrietta Lacks (unconsenting contributor to modern science whose cancer cells were the source of the immortalized HeLa cell line). The resultant assemblage forms a biomorphic cartography of Black resistance in which displacement becomes a generative force.

Finally, Prempeh’s paintings position time, memory, and belonging within the contexts of ancestral connection and personal transformation. In the diptych Di sea have many ghost (2025), the artist grounds her figures in a sprawling landscape with a dreamlike, cinematic feel, further underscoring her fascination with temporality by embedding schlag metal—imitation gold leaf that corrodes over time—into its surface.

In addition to participating in this exhibition, Boafo will take over Gagosian’s space in London’s Burlington Arcade, opening on July 3.

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