THE STORIES WE TELL

Featuring:

Stanwyck Cromwell
Victor Davson
Steve Green
Nelly Idagba
Tone Miller
Rosalind Nzinga Nichol
Nell Painter
Faith Saunders

The Stories We Tell brings together artists from across the diaspora whose works explore memory, migration, identity, and the layered narratives carried across borders and generations. This exhibition considers storytelling not simply as an act of remembrance, but as a form of survival, resistance, and self-definition.
Diasporic experiences are shaped by displacement and adaptation. The artists in this exhibition engage with inherited histories, personal stories, and cultural fragments to construct new visual languages. Through their work, they reveal how stories and cultural experiences are preserved for future generations. Their works speak to the tension between belonging and estrangement, continuity and rupture, loss and reinvention.
Rather than presenting a singular narrative, The Stories We Tell embraces multiplicity. Each piece offers a perspective shaped by geography, ancestry, and lived experience, while collectively reflecting shared themes: the weight of memory, the resilience of cultural knowledge, and the ongoing negotiation of identity within shifting social and political realities.
Storytelling within diasporic communities often exists outside official histories. It lives in oral traditions, gestures, food, music, and spiritual practices. In this exhibition, storytelling becomes a visual and spatial practice—one that reclaims erased narratives, challenges dominant histories, and imagines new futures.
At its core, The Stories We Tell asks: Who gets to tell history? What is remembered, and what is forgotten? How do we carry our pasts while shaping our identities?
The works in this exhibition remind us that stories are not static—they evolve, travel, and transform. They bind communities, transmit resilience, and affirm presence in a world that often demands invisibility.

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Host or Publisher Akwaaba Gallery