Godfried Donkor: History as Exchange, Not Inheritance

At Firstsite, It’s a Numbers Game by Godfried Donkor reframes history as something unstable, negotiated, and constantly rewritten. Running from May 23 to August 30, 2026, the exhibition marks the artist’s first UK institutional show, but its significance extends well beyond that milestone.

Donkor’s work operates through layering. Not simply as a visual technique, but as a way of thinking. Collage, painting, embroidery, and installation are brought together to construct narratives that resist linearity. Archival photographs sit alongside contemporary imagery. Financial Times pages intersect with Ghanaian Adinkra symbols. European heraldry merges with African textile traditions. The result is not a synthesis, but a tension, where histories overlap without fully resolving.

At the centre of this approach is a refusal to treat history as fixed. Donkor’s practice insists that the past is not a stable record, but a field of interpretation shaped by power, perspective, and repetition. His oft-stated conviction that “everything is mixed” becomes both method and message, challenging the boundaries that have traditionally separated cultures, geographies, and identities.

The exhibition’s title, It’s a Numbers Game, points toward systems that quantify and control. Trade, finance, empire. These are not abstract forces in Donkor’s work, but lived realities that continue to shape contemporary identity. His concept of a “triangle of commerce” connecting Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean foregrounds the enduring legacies of these exchanges, tracing how economic structures intersect with human experience.

At Firstsite, these global narratives are grounded in place. Colchester’s own history becomes part of the conversation, with Donkor drawing connections between the resistance of Boudicca and that of Yaa Asantewaa. This pairing collapses temporal and geographic distance, positioning acts of resistance as part of a shared, ongoing struggle rather than isolated events.

The exhibition’s visual language reinforces this complexity. Large-scale collages depict African figures emerging from fields of financial text, suggesting the inseparability of economic systems and human lives. Embroideries function as cultural bridges, weaving together symbolic traditions that speak to power, identity, and continuity. Monumental paintings revisit historical scenes, not to reconstruct them, but to question how they have been told.

A boxing ring installation introduces another layer. For Donkor, boxing has long functioned as a metaphor for migration and exchange. The ring becomes a site of confrontation, resilience, and performance, reflecting the pressures and negotiations embedded within diasporic experience.

What distinguishes Donkor’s work is its ability to hold contradiction. It acknowledges violence and exploitation while also recognising creativity, adaptation, and survival. His use of gold leaf, often associated with religious iconography, elevates figures and narratives that have historically been marginalised, repositioning them within a visual language of reverence.

The exhibition also forms part of Firstsite’s wider programme exploring why humans make art. In this context, Donkor’s practice offers a compelling answer. Art becomes a tool for navigating complexity, for holding multiple truths simultaneously, and for imagining connections that extend beyond inherited narratives.

Coinciding with his participation in the Venice Biennale, It’s a Numbers Game arrives at a moment of increased visibility for Donkor’s work. Yet the exhibition itself resists the idea of culmination. Instead, it positions his practice as part of an ongoing conversation, one that continues to evolve as histories are revisited and reinterpreted.

At Firstsite, that conversation is made visible. Not as a single story, but as a network of intersecting voices, images, and systems.