Biography
The practice operates as a trilogy of investigative layers, each anchored in specific historical moments and institutions. The first engages the material and production history of tyres in Ghana through sculpture made from discarded inner tubes and tyre byproducts. It is anchored in the Bonsa Tyre Company and Firestone Ghana's monopoly on tyre manufacturing in the 1970s, and in the company's decline and the influx of used and imported tyres that fundamentally reshaped Ghana's tyre economy. The second investigates the labour sites and informal architectures that emerged in response: the vulcaniser shops that expanded as manufacturing declined, where workers extended tyre lifecycles through rethreading and repair. It is anchored in Ghana Tyre Service, the now-defunct rethreading operation that represented an earlier industrial response to tyre circulation, and in the proliferation of informal repair spaces that occupy contested land and navigate contested urban politics. The third examines the regulatory and infrastructural systems that enable this circulation, through painting and works on paper that address Ghana's road history, specifically the 1974 traffic switch (Operation Keep Right) and the road networks that sustain the industry's movement and economic lifecycle.
These interventions take the work to its source. Across Accra, Anyah has returned finished works to the vulcaniser shops and repair sites that supplied their materials, in the Homecoming series (2023 to 2025, including Homecoming Dome and Homecoming Madina Estates), the simultaneous multi-site Forgotten Futures (2024) and Portrait of a Vulcaniser as Signage (2026).
Anyah is building an archive for the tyre industry, beginning with one spanning all repair and labour sites across the region. Its research and knowledge have been carried into journals, biennials, museums and universities. His essays have appeared in Thresholds 54 (MIT Press), Log 66 (Anyone Corporation), LIMN 11 and Adjacent (NYU ITP), and he has presented the research at Rice University, the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art in Kigali, and the Goethe-Institut in Accra. The work was shown at the Biennale Internationale de Sculpture de Ouagadougou (2025), where he was also artist-in-residence, and is forthcoming at the 16th Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art (2026).
Recent solo presentations include Assembly: Bonsa Origins at Pa Gya! A Literary Festival in Accra (2026), The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born at Artitude MMXXVI (2026) and Elementary Rebirth at Nubuke Foundation (2023). Group exhibitions include Atlas of Uncertainty at the Origins Centre Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg; Ellipse Art Projects: 5th Anniversary Exhibition, Paris; Worldmaking at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Form Comes To Mind at The Anzai Gallery, Tokyo; Don't Be A Square! at AKKA Project, Venice; and Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen. Press includes STIRworld, Sawubona and Artwork Archive.
Anyah was a finalist for the Ellipse Art Prize (2025), Second Runner-Up for the Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Art (2023), and is a 2026 Building Beyond Fellow of the Prince Claus Fund. His work is held in the Celine Art Project, the Sir David Adjaye Collection, the Fischer Shull Collection, the Isshaq Foundation, the Kuenyehia Collection and The Institute Museum of Ghana.
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