Trans-Queer Ghanaian Outsider Volume I: PROXY

By Famehodiɛ Ɔkyeame

May 17th - July 31st, 2025
Gallery Hours: by appointment

Trans-Queer Ghanaian Outsider is a protest art project that seeks to visibilize, name, and validate Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Nonconforming Ghanaian identities. It seeks to counteract the prevailing white supremacist notion that African-ness, Blackness, and Trans-Queerness cannot exist within one congruent intersection. Such a naming is crucial for Gender Expansive Ghanaians - and Gender Expansive Folks throughout the African continent, the Americas, Europe, and the wider diaspora - who live under social, political, and cultural colonial systems that are intent on erasing us from existence. My ultimate goal with this project is to create spaces of belonging for myself and other Trans Ghanaians/Africans by reminding us that we are necessary and valid in all that we are, while naming and critiquing the impacts of white supremacy, colonization, and cis-hetero norms on the lives of Ghanaian Trans-Queer peoples.

PROXY, the first volume in this project, is a series of photographs in which foods, objects, and materials that are commonly used in Ghana are placed in various yonic and phallic arrangements. 

The use of these common Ghanaian foods, cloths, and material items as a ‘proxy’ to the spectrum of (non)(multi)(trans)(a)gendered African identities serves as a satiric rebuke of the fear that transphobic/queerphobic Ghanaians have of the Trans/Queer community. That identities that are so integral, nourishing, and omnipresent within our communities are instead othered as “unusual” - and even feared to be “infectious”, as if one can “catch” being gay or trans - is at worst murderous and at best tragically ludicrous. How can one be so irrationally afraid of the source of one's own lifeblood?