Exhibition view (Photo (c) Iris Laner)
Rooted: Return, Retrieve, Rise – A Collaborative Exhibition Project between Mozarteum University Salzburg and the University of Education, Winneba
In the summer semester of 2026, students at Mozarteum University Salzburg developed and realised the exhibition Rooted: Return, Retrieve, Rise as part of a university course led by Iris Laner. The project emerged from a collaboration with students at the University of Education, Winneba, whose artworks had been created in the Independent Studies in Drawing (ISD) course taught by Ebenezer Kow Abraham.
The drawings from Winneba were produced during the summer semester of 2025 as part of ISD. Through a radical pedagogical experiment, the course provides a framework for critical engagement with and reworking of the inherited colonial and Eurocentric conventions rooted in academic realism and formalist traditions. In response, students' output demonstrated varied creative strategies of negotiating inherited visual language. Their strategies could be understood in relation to the exhibition’s tripartite concept of Return, Retrieve and Rise.
Exhibition view (Photo (c) Iris Laner)
For example, having reflected on how they were taught to understand drawing in the past, Anastasia Eshun and Marian Abena Opoku questioned the hidden influences behind this epistemic conditioning by “return”_ing to Adinkra symbols to reawaken culturally situated meanings within contemporary drawing practices. Again, Clara Jennifer Asare and Francesca Osei Boateng “retrieve” everyday Ghanaian objects, such as Calabash and Oware boards, as viable surfaces for their drawings and employ traditional techniques like scorching and engraving. Their engagement asserts their material sovereignty and questions the dominant pencil-and-paper template. Victus Apedo and Liza Edwina Awortwe, on their part, extended these engagements to “rise” by inventing new drawing techniques. Whilst Victus combined sewing of kente patterns with ballpen marks, Liza made her drawings entirely with thumbprints to assert her identity and embodied presence in her work.
In the Winneba pedagogical and cultural contexts, the drawings on display do not simply defy the institutional drawing canons. Rather, they complicate and rearticulate them to foreground the agency of Ghanaian students in negotiating their cultural memory, materiality and technique within a decolonial pedagogical drawing classroom.
Exhibition view (Photo by Niklas Panhuber)
Rather than simply presenting the works, the Salzburg students approached exhibition-making as a collaborative and dialogical process. Working in small groups, they engaged in conversations with the artists in Winneba to gain insight into their ideas, expectations, and wishes regarding the exhibition setting, atmosphere, and modes of presentation. This exchange became a central component of the project, allowing the exhibition design to be shaped in close relation to the artists’ perspectives.
Rooted: Return, Retrieve, Rise explored questions of belonging, cultural memory, identity, and transformation. By bringing together artistic production and curatorial practice across geographical and institutional boundaries, the project fostered intercultural dialogue and created a shared space for reflection on how artworks can travel, be interpreted, and be re-contextualized through collaboration.
The exhibition demonstrates the potential of international partnerships in arts education, highlighting how students can learn from one another through sustained exchange and collective engagement with visual culture.
Visitors at the exhibition (Photo (c) Niklas Panhuber)