Kofi Mensah

Hi. I'm Kofi.

Independent curator and critic based between Liverpool and Accra. I write about African and diaspora art — what gets shown, what doesn't, and why that question keeps mattering.

Selected work

Elsewhere

Liverpool Biennial 2025 — Group Exhibition

Eight artists across five sites in Liverpool, examining how African artists construct ideas of home and migration without romanticising either shore. None of them first-time exhibitors in the UK; all of them here because the work demanded it.

Art After the Empire

Podcast — Ongoing since 2023

Conversations with artists, curators, and writers at the edges of the mainstream. The premise: the institutional frameworks we inherited from the twentieth century are not neutral. I talk to people building something different anyway.

The Curatorial Gaze

MIT Press — Forthcoming 2026

A collection of essays on the politics of display, written over ten years. Some of the best arguments I've ever had with myself are in here.

Essays

On curating outside the institution Frieze, Issue 243
Mar 2026
What the museum does not want you to know e-flux journal #138
Nov 2025
On the fetishization of African contemporary art Art Monthly, No. 478
Jun 2024
Lagos and the myth of arrival The White Review, No. 31
Feb 2024

Notes

On institutional time

Institutions move at the speed of their committees. Artists move at the speed of their work. The gap between those two tempos is where most of the friction lives.

A question I keep coming back to

Who is the contemporary African art market actually for? Not rhetorically — I mean: if you traced the money, where does it start and where does it land?

The personal site as refusal

Having a place online that isn't beholden to an algorithm feels like a small act of resistance. I'm trying to take it seriously.

Get in touch

Available for curatorial consultation, critical writing, and speaking. Response time is honest — I'm usually between institutions or on a deadline.