The Collection

Serge Attukwei Clottey is a Ghanaian artist working across installation, performance, photography, and sculpture. Born and raised in the Labadi area of Accra, he grew up surrounded by art — his father was a painter who encouraged him to pursue it as a career — and studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra before attending Guignard University of Art of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on a scholarship. In 2019, he received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Brighton.

Clottey is the creator of Afrogallonism, an artistic concept built around the yellow plastic Kufuor gallon — a ubiquitous container in Ghana, originally imported from Europe to carry oil and endlessly repurposed to carry water amid the country's water shortages. By cutting, stitching, melting, and stacking these gallons alongside other found and discarded materials — jute sacks, rubber tires, wire, wood — Clottey transforms an object of necessity and consumerism into sculpture, collage, wearable costume, and large-scale installation, using it to explore trade, migration, postcolonial identity, and Ghana's ongoing water crisis. He is also the founder of GoLokal, a performance collective through which he stages public interventions addressing Ghanaian politics and society, engaging audiences who might not otherwise encounter his work in a gallery setting.

Clottey has had solo exhibitions at Gallery 1957, Accra and London; GNYP Gallery, Berlin; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; and Simchowitz, Los Angeles, and his work has been included in group exhibitions and public art projects including Desert X (Palm Desert, CA, 2021, and AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 2022) and The Line, London (2022). His work is held in the collections of the Nubuke Foundation, Accra; Modern Forms, UK; and the World Bank Art Program. He lives and works in Accra, Ghana.