Yaw Owusu at Efie Gallery, Dubai: Coin Sculpture, Residue and the Question of Value

Start with a coin that buys almost nothing. Multiply it by thousands, rub it, oxidise it, stitch it into a surface, and it begins to glow like gold. That sleight of hand — worthless made precious, then questioned — is the engine of Yaw Owusu’s art, and it drives Yaw Owusu’s “Where the Tide Flows, and the Dunes Gather” at Efie Gallery in Dubai, open from 16 November 2026 to 10 January 2027. It is his second solo exhibition with the gallery, timed to Efie’s fifth anniversary and to Alserkal Art Week.

A beach in Ghana, a sack of pesewas

Owusu was born in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1992. He studied sculpture and painting at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) — the Kumasi art school where El Anatsui also trained — and later took an MFA at Pratt Institute in New York, where he is now based.

His signature material arrived by accident. According to Efie, he found corroded pesewa coins on a Ghanaian beach, then obtained thousands more from the Central Bank of Ghana. A detail he has made central to the work: those Ghanaian coins were minted by the Royal Canadian Mint. A national currency, the emblem of post-colonial sovereignty, produced abroad. From there the questions about economic and political independence follow naturally. Over time he has added US pennies, UAE fils, stainless steel and copper to the mix.

The recognition has been steady: the Kuenyehia Art Prize for Contemporary Ghanaian Art in 2018, awards at Pratt in 2020, a museum solo at ICA San Diego in 2022 and his first Middle East solo, “In the Cool of Day”, at Efie later that year.

Inside “Where the Tide Flows, and the Dunes Gather”

The exhibition brings together mixed-media sculptures, textured canvases and works on paper. The coin works are the familiar part: low-denomination currency massed and transformed until its collective surface takes on a gilded sheen. Individually, the coins are near-weightless economically; together they acquire physical mass and visual splendour. The gallery’s text treats that contrast as the point — a picture of prosperity built on labour whose value goes unrecognised, and a prompt to ask who sets value, who produces it and who gets to keep it.

The new departure is a series of works on paper made from the residue of the sculptural process itself. The weathered, oxidised surfaces carry the rust-like stains and sediment that would normally be washed away. Waste becomes both medium and archive. These sheets invert the logic of the sculptures: instead of the gleaming product, we see what was shed to make it. The press text puts it neatly — “every system of accumulation produces a remainder”.

Tides, dunes and the arithmetic of small things

The title is not decorative. Tides and dunes are formations built over time from countless tiny particles and forces; neither exists without accumulation. Owusu applies the same logic to his own practice, in which small repeated gestures — a coin placed, a surface rubbed — add up to something monumental. In Dubai, a city literally built between sea and sand, the metaphor gains local resonance.

It also places Owusu in a meaningful lineage. West African artists have long transformed discarded or circulating materials into abstraction of great beauty, from bottle caps to printing plates. Owusu’s contribution is to work with money itself, the most abstract of all circulating materials, and to keep its politics visible.

Efie Gallery and Alserkal Avenue

Efie, at Warehouse 61 on Alserkal Avenue, has spent five years building a programme centred on artists from Africa and the diaspora in a city whose art market has historically looked elsewhere. Opening this show during Alserkal Art Week puts it in front of the widest regional audience of the season, alongside a dense cluster of gallery openings in Al Quoz.

Why collectors should pay attention

Owusu’s coin works are already recognisable; the residue works on paper are new and, for now, rarer. For collectors, they offer an entry point into the practice that is conceptually inseparable from the sculptures yet distinct in material and scale. For artists and students of sculpture, the show is a compact case study in how a process can generate a second body of work out of its own by-products.

Visiting information

Efie Gallery, Warehouse 61, Alserkal Avenue, 17th Street, Al Quoz Industrial Area 1, Dubai. 16 November 2026 – 10 January 2027; opening reception details to be confirmed by the gallery. Open Monday–Thursday 11:00–19:00, Friday–Saturday 11:00–21:00, Sunday 13:00–21:00; phone +971 4 252 4182; [email protected]. See our Yaw Owusu exhibition listing, the official exhibition page, and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.