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OBJECT 

IMAGE



Project Name

Vulcaniser Archive
2023-

A research and photography project documenting vulcanizer shops across West Africa, beginning in Ghana and recently extending to Burkina Faso. At its core is a map highlighting the locations of shops across various regions. Findings are shared through journals and translated into sculptures and image-based works.

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Project Name

The Past is Not The Present
Digital collage, photographic prints on FujiColor Crystal Paper
2025

The Past Is Not the Present explores the evolution of Ghana’s tire industry—from a once-thriving industrial powerhouse to its current state—through layered overlays of past and present imagery. The series asks what lessons the past can offer and how we might imagine a future of renewal and growth. These digital collages are printed on archival photographic paper, preserving the work with clarity and depth.


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THE ACT OF LABOUR

 Single-channel video, split screen, with sound

2:30 minutes

2025


First presented at
Biennale Internationale de Sculpture de Ouagadougou (BISO)


This video observes vulcanizers at work—mending tires, pumping air, and carrying out steady acts of repair. Presented in a split-screen format, two scenes unfold side by side, drawing attention to the focus, skill, and care embedded in these repetitive gestures. The Act of Labour foregrounds the quiet value of everyday work and the people whose labor sustains movement, circulation, and daily life.












Dela Anyah - Sculptor, Artist | Transformative Art from Discarded Materials
Photograph by Tesa Sackitey


Dela Anyah (b. 1986)’s artistic practice is grounded in the informal labor environments of vulcanizer shops in Ghana, where he examines themes of value, identity, displacement, and material memory within informal economies. Through his multidisciplinary research initiative, Vulcanizer Archive, which integrates photography, video, sound, and field documentation, he systematically records these essential yet precarious workplaces and the communities they support. Employing discarded tires and found materials, Anyah produces sculptural and photographic works that articulate the nuanced tensions between history and contemporaneity, mobility and rootedness, waste and value. While firmly situated within the specific socio-industrial realities of Ghana, his work extends to encompass a critical investigation of the global tire waste industry, its environmental consequences, and the interconnected informal economies related to repair and reuse practices worldwide. By illuminating the latent worth in materials often marginalized or discarded, Anyah’s practice maps the complex histories and potential futures of these intertwined local and global systems.

Anyah was the Second Runner-Up for the Kuenyehia Prize. His work is included in the Celine Art Project (Puerto Banús), Sir David Adjaye (New York, London, Accra), and the Fischer Shull Collection (North Carolina, Mexico).

Selected solo exhibitions include: Nubuke Foundation, Accra (2023) and The Noldor Residency, Accra (2022).

Selected group exhibitions include: Akka Project, Venice (2024), Gallery 1957, Accra (2024), The Anzai Gallery, Tokyo (2024), Museum of Science and Technology, Accra (2023), Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2023), and Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen (2023).


Photograph by Tesa Sackitey
Photo Courtesy: Noldor Artist Residency
Photo Courtesy: Noldor Artist Residency