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Compound House Accra



 The compound house is a dominant indigenous African architectural archetype, an appealing alternative to isolated single-family homes. In Ghana, compound houses were historically arranged with multiple buildings oriented inward toward a central courtyard. Shared facilities and communal resources encouraged sociability, friendship, and a sense that when one eats, all eat. 

Such values undergird Compound House, a Ghanaian gallery founded in 2022 by Nuna Adisenu-Doe with the help of Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson. Both are curators, researchers, and artists. When I met Nuna and Tracy on the leafy grounds of the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre, I immediately understood that the mission of Compound House stemmed from its creators; their kindness and insightfulness were evident, as was their commitment to uplifting Ghanaian artists at all stages of their careers.

Contrary to its name, Compound House has no permanent physical space. The nomadic gallery’s projects have been installed in locations throughout Ghana, sheltered by the ethos of the compound house, if not by a shared roof. As you will read, this model emerged from necessity but also from a critical engagement with space and how artists work within it. From shipping containers to shopping malls to arid lawns, each site has shaped the exhibition it hosted. 

Adaptability, coupled with Nuna and Tracy’s willingness to pitch in on tasks big and small, has allowed Compound House to thrive despite Ghana’s developing infrastructure. In both structure and disposition, the gallery favors flexibility over rigidity. This has made Compound House a lynchpin within the flourishing Ghanaian scene, allowing them to platform experimental artists while remaining attentive to the practical conditions that ensure sustainability and longevity.





Nuna Adisenu-Doe, Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, Colleen Foran, January 13, 2026

Colleen    

For those unfamiliar, how do you describe Compound House?

Tracy    

As the name suggests, Compound House has a collective spirit first and foremost. Compound houses are built on a system of shared space. Usually, you have a courtyard that serves as a shared kitchen where food is also shared among those who live there. Compound House is based on that concept of communality.
        We are both alumni of KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in central Ghana), and the notion of communality is embedded within the ethos of the school’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. KNUST also hosts an active artist collective of students and alumni called blaxTARLINES, which we are also part of.
        KNUST and blaxTARLINES were critical to our early conceptions of Compound House, because we live in Ghana where there’s a lack of infrastructure for experimental artists. The archetype was traditional painting and sculpture, so when artists affiliated with those institutions began to work with smell, video, and multimedia, we didn’t have museums or galleries that could accommodate. And Nuna and I had gone through those same struggles to find space. So it’s been pivotal for us to have this independent way of building beyond the mainstream.

Nuna    

Compound House intentionally recruits and mentors young artists who are looking to get into the gallery world. Artists sometimes do not see the back end of how things are done, right? So some artists in Ghana feel cheated when commissions and sales happen. They don’t always understand why a gallery should have to represent them or show their work. Compound House is a chance for artists to reclaim their agency. With us, artists have the opportunity to show their work and still dictate how it is put out into the public. 
        I should also highlight that the gallery is an artist-led space. That means everything involved with running a gallery—administration, curatorial, installation—is in the hands of artists. As such, Compound House breaks the traditional hierarchy where it can be difficult to speak to gallery leaders, even as a represented artist. Those hierarchies still exist even though the art world would describe itself as very open, very liberal. At Compound House, all of us operate at an equal level. This approach means that a lot of practitioners who might not describe themselves as “artists” are able to propose ideas or programs.
        As a result, a Compound House project might not necessarily be an exhibition; it could be an activation of someone’s research, a talk, or a collaboration with another institution to show something intangible.

Colleen    

You touched on how you really value and listen to artists, how that’s central to your artist-led gallery. So how do you understand yourselves as artists versus curators? How do those roles complement each other, and how do they diverge?

Tracy    

I don’t really see myself as a traditional curator, I see myself more as an artist curating. That goes a long way because, as an artist myself, I know the experience is different when the curator is also an artist. There’s a difference in how artists look at exhibition-making, where curating doesn't have to be just all theory and literature.
        My practice also centers on certain egalitarian principles of care, which for me is more vital than theoretical curating alone. It’s based on the idea that you, the supposed curator, could end up being the chef for an opening. It’s not rigid—you will find all of us doing bits of construction or painting. We all move differently in regard to how we are able to provide for artists, and we are always hands-on about offering our expertise.

Colleen    

I’m putting that together with what you talked about earlier as to how this is useful for the artists you exhibit, because it gives them opportunities to learn these skills. It goes both ways. You're bringing everything you can to the table, but you're also making opportunities for young artists to learn these skills too. 

Tracy    

Yes—we don’t think like, “because you're a curator, you can't clean a space.” It has to be an open question, not something that we already know and impose. It's always about learning alongside the artists. It's based on genuine friendship for each other.

Colleen    

Do you think Compound House will always be nomadic? Is that core to what you do? Or could you ever see it as something more rooted?

Nuna    

Operating as a nomadic space isn't some grand philosophy of not wanting to be in a physical space. It's simply because when we started the gallery we couldn't find an affordable space to buy or rent. We didn't want to wait till we got money, so we decided to just start with what we had.

Tracy    

But even if we get a space, we'll want to keep that nomadic character, because it is important to retain open-endedness—it can be good to have a structured space, but it is not the only way. For us, that’s not the ideal. 
        We operate from a curatorial point of view where it is vital to really pay attention to the nature of the artist's work. Yes, there are some artists whose work will fit a white cube! But we have so many other artists who have a kind of guerilla agency in their work. Some of Compound House’s spaces will be specifically inspired by an artist's work. The gallery cooperates, even if the artist wants to show inside a house or from a club. Rather than having a house and forcing furniture into it, we want to shape the house around the furniture.

Nuna    

In a traditional gallery setting, every artist’s work has to fit. The gallery might be able to develop an adaptation, but usually that's very difficult; there’s the white walls and very little they can do to change shape or height. That's the advantage of not having a physical space. We don't develop an exhibition idea and then look for the space—we visit with the artist before we plan the exhibition.
        But that's not always the situation. Sometimes we rent a space for a year, and because we have it available, we invite a specific project that fits. I don't want to sound purist; I think one of the most important gestures we have adopted is improvisation. It comes from a spirit of not having everything. I've been visiting more studios this past year to understand how the spaces artists are working in are influencing their work. In the States, you have a complex with like one-hundred artist studios and facilities. In Ghana, we don't have those things, so you have to make a studio out of your room or garage.

Colleen    

How do you scout these spaces for a particular artist’s practice?

Nuna    

On the practical side, we just seek out available spaces. We put out words: “We are looking for where we can do this.” From there, people bring us suggestions. But some of them might not work with our budgets or how the location is arranged. Artists themselves are also able to propose spaces. For example, an artist proposed a space at the shopping mall on KNUST’s campus. There was a store that had been closed down, so I looked at the space and felt that it worked. That former store became the Kumasi location of the three-sited exhibition we developed for Hassan Issah.

Tracy    

At the beginning, it was very, very challenging. For our first exhibition, we hosted Samuel Baah Kortey—his work is very adaptable, and one of the lessons we learned is that it's helpful when you have an artist whose work has a kind of amorphic structure. We had gone for a space inside a shipping container, but there were structural issues. Initially, we wanted to cover parts to have even walls—that kind of pristineness—inside the container. But contingencies happen! There were leakages after we’d plastered to smooth all the defects. But the artist responded with, “No, pristineness is not the character of my work.” His work has a kind of gory character, and it’s very asymmetrical. 
        You can imagine if it had been an artist whose work needed pristineness, and you are in a space that won’t allow for it. You have to experiment on site. And that kind of improvisation really helped us to make the exhibition come alive, rather than fixing it within a certain convention. Contingencies drive these kinds of experimentations with access.

Colleen    

You mentioned your ethos as inspired by being at KNUST and in blaxTARLINES. How do you see Compound House fitting in with the larger Ghanaian art scene, and how has that changed since you started four years ago?

Nuna    

I've realized there are many artists yearning for new exhibition models. Because we are a young gallery, we are able to tailor to artists’ needs. There are many other commercially viable and successful galleries in Ghana, but we somehow have found ourselves in between a commercial institution and a grassroots institution. That's where our work sometimes moves into social-interventionist attitudes.
        Over time, the reputation we've built in Ghana—not to toot our horn, but as an institution that cares. We put a lot of work into research. We listen to artists rather than impose. For example, I don't have strict contracts where I say, “You either work my way or it's no way.” There are certain demands that are unrealistic, but we haven't encountered any of that yet. So far, it’s gone smoothly with all of the artists we've worked with.

Colleen    

Do you think artist-led galleries are the way of the future in Ghana or around the world? Is this a model that you think can be or should be done elsewhere?

Tracy    

For us, artist-led spaces are a strategic model, especially when we don’t have many government support systems. But that doesn't mean we don't need the government to support the arts! We need that. Artists have limitations in terms of how far they can go with their own initiatives, especially when it comes to infrastructure. You need basic things: constant electricity, internet, water, light, good transportation, you get me! That goes into politics but we are striving to build these models in our own capacities.

Nuna    

In Ghana, artist-led spaces have become prolific. Our government-funded arts institutions have previously been very underwhelming. So artists who have broken through the commercial side and made some money for themselves come back to the country and try to build spaces. When we talk about artist-led or artist-funded spaces, it's not just us! There are so many artists—Amoako Boafo, Ibrahim Mahama, Kwesi Botchway, Isshaq Ismail, and Cornelius Annor—who have opened studio spaces to mentor younger artists. The way they approach programming might not be exactly like what we do, but even the fact that these spaces exist—for me that is the starting point.
        Globally, a lot of people are challenging the stereotype of the expected gallery structure. Artist-led spaces are more sensitive to other artists’ work; that is what I believe. This is an exciting shift, but I do think the artists leading these spaces should get professional training in how to run a gallery. When we say, “we are still learning,” we aren’t suggesting that we won't learn how to do things the right way. We want to hold ourselves accountable for learning best practices so we don't build all these spaces and then not get it right in terms of programming and direction.

Colleen    

I imagine that helps with longevity and sustainability.

Tracy    

Exactly. For us, we don’t want to get stuck on one model, because something can start very revolutionary and become very co-opted and dogmatic. It might become a trendy thing, where everyone's talking about communities. 
        So it's not about taking the position of “us against the world.” It's not this against that—we can accommodate contradictions, and we don't want to take that kind of stringent binary. There are things to learn from certain commercial structured spaces. There are things to learn from very unstructured spaces as well. 
        Artist-led spaces will be necessary in the future, but they have always been there. People are assimilating indigenous cultural and community systems that have always been there. The contemporary is not something that is totally opposite to what is indigenous. So, I wouldn’t even call it new. I wouldn’t even call it “future.”
        But I also wouldn’t say it’s always going to be the same. It will definitely change. First and foremost, I wish to create space for artists’ voices to be heard, for them to be able to produce the unimaginable.

Nuna    

To that end, we are starting a Compound House mentorship program with our long-time programming partners, the Foundation for Contemporary Art–Ghana (FCA) run by Adwoa Amoah and Ato Annan.

Tracy    

Not every artist has had training about contracts, how to organize portfolios, how to insert yourself into institutional spaces, how to apply for grants—all those tools for artists today. We want to create a program particularly for those who have not had training in the formal structures of galleries and museums. We want to bridge that gap.
        We will bring in professionals to share their expertise and it will be structured for the long term, so an artist would have a mentor she could work with over months. And we'll be launching it this year, hopefully in March! 


Colleen Foran is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary African art at Boston University. She previously worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

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