Emmanuel Tieku Aggrey

Artist, architect of memory, born in 1994 in Cape Coast, Ghana.

You often encounter his work where you wouldn’t expect to find art:
on beaches, in landfills, in abandoned factories.
In places where textile waste piles up in layers, he installs monumental surfaces made of garments that once belonged to someone.
This is not a metaphor, but reality. The materials in his work have lived, warmed, been worn and then discarded, shipped, forgotten.

Emmanuel grew up around the fabrics collected by his grandmother, a Queen Mother with a strong sense of staging. He studied civil engineering, researching the reuse of textiles in the construction industry. That is where he found his language as an artist.

His works are not traditional paintings. They are textile sediments.
Layered with pigment, chemistry, and memory, Emmanuel transforms discarded clothing into layered abstract paintings, sculptures, and installations.

He has exhibited at ArtBasel Miami and other notable exhibitions.
This is not about upcycling.
It is about documenting how much human life a single piece of fabric can carry and how quickly we forget those lives.

Since 2023, Emmanuel has been working on a project that is not meant to be finished.
It is called How to Heal a Broken World– a lifetime project of textile archiving and material innovation.
A textile installation that travels from place to place, constantly growing, collecting materials, absorbing traces.
It begins on a landfill in Ghana, stretches across the ocean, appears in old industrial buildings, between boats, on docked ships, beneath museal glass domes.
Each location changes the installation. Each place leaves a mark.

The project is not a memorial.
It is a moving archive.
Emmanuel often speaks of fabric as a vessel. For memory. For pain. For questions without quick answers.
How to Heal a Broken World is his way of making those questions visible. Without preaching. Without drama.
Only with fabric. And time. And the willingness to listen.

We at ToChoose are proud to be Emmanuel’s project partner.
This is the first initiative of its kind that we have embraced, co-developed, and helped grow.
As creative collaborators, we are building the infrastructure, expanding the network, and shaping the narrative — together.

More: www.howtohealabrokenworld.com

Alongside his large-scale installations, Emmanuel also creates smaller textile works.
These pieces are made from the same materials as his spatial interventions and follow the same artistic logic.
They carry the same tension — but in a more condensed, more intimate form.
Many are intended for private spaces and available to collect.

These textile compositions move between painting and object.
They are flat, but not still.
They respond to light, to distance, to the viewer’s gaze.
Layers of color overlap with traces of oil, chalk, sand, or industrial pigment.
Some pieces are quiet, almost meditative. Others seem to expand outward, as if the textile surface were frozen in mid-motion.

Titles like Freckles of the Fading Darkness, Boundary Lines, Earth, Where We Belong, or The Three Stages of Reckoning reference themes like climate impact, memory, and the shifting geographies of consumption.

These works are often made in mid-sized formats — 80 × 80 cm or 120 × 90 cm.
They stand independently from the larger installations — and yet remain part of the same artistic world.

Some of these works are available for acquisition.