Delali Cofie: A Place of Ours
A Place of Ours centres the quiet, everyday moments that shape identity—gestures of play, rest, conversation, and wandering that accumulate into a portrait of both self and belonging.
United Contemporary is pleased to present A Place of Ours, a solo exhibition by Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer, Delali Cofie. Curated by Emilie Croning, the exhibition brings together a body of work developed over the past seven years, offering an intimate reflection on family, community, and the evolving meaning of home.
Rooted in Cofie’s lived experience between Accra and Toronto, the work offers a counterpoint to distanced or mediated representations of Ghana, instead privileging proximity, presence, and lived intimacy. The photographs function as both a love letter and a quiet tribute to the people and places that continue to shape the artist’s life.
Play, rest, conversation, and wandering unfold gently across Cofie’s images, attending to the subtle acts through which a sense of belonging slowly takes shape. In this way, the work unfolds as a form of visual language, where meaning emerges through rhythm, repetition, and care. To fully encounter these images, however, requires a different mode of attention—one grounded not only in looking, but in listening.
Drawing on Tina M. Campt’s reflections on Black diasporic photography as a practice of listening—to images, to memory, and to the quiet frequencies of daily life—Cofie’s photographs can be understood as images that carry atmosphere, emotional texture, and a kind of audible presence. They seem to emit a sound that is not literal but felt: the low hum of conversation, distant music, crashing waves, afternoon stillness, echoing laughter, or a silence that exists just outside the frame. What the photographs communicate cannot always be translated into language, but is nonetheless deeply present. The images ask the viewer not only to see, but to sense; to sit with the feeling of a moment rather than search for a singular narrative.
A Place of Ours is part of the core programming for the 2026 CONTACT Photo Festival.
In tandem with his solo exhibition, Delali Cofie presents a larger-than-life, black-and-white photograph as a billboard installation at the corner of Queen Street West and Augusta Avenue.
The artist would like to thank the Superframe Fund for their generous support and guidance.