Selorm Attikpo — Mending to Preserve

The verb in the title is literal. Selorm Attikpo repairs the photographs before he hangs them: damaged prints from three decades of Ghanaian hip hop, physically mended, then shown beside the recordings and the paper that survived with them. Mending to Preserve opens Friday August 21, 6 to 8pm, at the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta on University Avenue in Pittsburgh Yards. Attikpo, who works as Selormjay, founded yoyo tinz in Accra in 2013 and has built a personal archive of roughly 10,000 files on the scene since. He put on Ghana's first hip hop festival in 2018. He has been researching a permanent hip hop museum for Ghana as a Villa Albertine resident, which is what put him in Atlanta: two cities written out of the hip hop story for years, both of which wrote themselves back in. What separates this from the usual archive show is that the damage stays visible. A mended print does not pretend the neglect never happened. It says somebody came back for it. Free, Thursday to Saturday, noon to five.