On a warm Friday evening at the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta, in a room filled with the low hum of conversation, artist Selorm Attikpo, known in Accra’s hip-hop scene as Selormjay, moved through a crowd that had come to see “Mending to Preserve,” his new exhibition and the culmination of his time in a cultural-exchange program that brings Francophone-African artists, curators, and scholars to Atlanta each year.
The show is presented by ADAMA in collaboration with Villa Albertine, the French cultural institution behind the Bridge Residency program, which brought Attikpo to Atlanta in 2024. The exhibition pulls together photography, mixed-media paintings, and pieces drawn from yoyo tinz, the archiving platform Attikpo founded in Accra in 2013 to document African hip-hop culture.
Of everything on display, one image stopped me longer than the rest: a street MC caught mid-performance, seemingly unplanned, ringed by a small crowd of boys. One of them, off to the side, is watching in total absorption, the look of a kid clocking, maybe for the first time, that this is a thing a person can do.
A show around restoration
The title is not a metaphor Attikpo arrived at lightly.
“Mending here is about mending the misconceptions about hip-hop in general, whether it’s in Africa or around the world,” he explained.
He sees those misconceptions running in two directions: the idea that hip-hop is only music rather than a full culture of resistance, education, and community, and the more specific assumption that African hip-hop is a copy of something that happened first, and better, somewhere else. “There are real people behind hip-hop, and there are real conversations going on in hip-hop,” Attikpo said, “and hip-hop also has a purpose.”
The preserving half of the title is just as deliberate. “Hip-hop is in its fifties,” Attikpo said, “and a lot of the pioneers are very much alive, even in Africa.” For him, that’s the urgency. “Preserving means archiving these stories whilst the pioneers are still alive,” he said, “so that nobody tells their story for them.”
What ‘mending’ looks like
Several works in “Mending to Preserve” incorporate CDs and cassette tapes that show visible wear — and visible restoration. “That would be the repair,” Attikpo said, “salvaging these CDs that were almost damaged. … giving it a new life.” He compared the approach to kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold.
New canvas works featured in the show document a mending technique specific to Ghana’s hip-hop scene. “We used the milky liquid from the yellow oleander plant,” Attikpo explained. “We would squeeze out the fluid on the tape, then stick the tape in and rewind it back into the cassette.” It’s the same fix, he added, people once used to mend torn currency.
Flyers from Accra parties and shows also appear in “Mending to Preserve,” next to Attikpo’s photography.
“The flyers represent the kind of activities that we have been engaging in around hip-hop on the continent,” Attikpo said. “The photography is to show some of the people behind our hip-hop scene. The recordings are for people to understand the kind of melodies we are messing with, the kind of stories we are telling, and the kind of vibe we are on the continent. And the archival materials also show what we have preserved.”
Two cities, one story
Attikpo’s Bridge Residency allowed for room to dig into that hip-hop history without a deadline looming. “I wasn’t pressured to produce any findings or work, so I really took my time to research,” he said. He visited Emory University’s hip-hop archive, independent Atlanta archives, and, on a trip outside the city, the New York Public Library’s archives. Those experiences shaped how he now thinks about the difference between institutional and community archiving. ADAMA, he said, “provided me with a lot of connections here in Atlanta” and, ultimately, the wall space to show what he’d found.
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Working in Atlanta was a deliberate choice. Like Accra, the city spent years outside hip-hop’s mainstream narrative. “This Southern city . … was forgotten in discussions about hip-hop — in favor of cities like New York City and Los Angeles, but is now America’s capital of hip-hop,” Attikpo wrote in his artist statement.
“Mending to Preserve” also makes the case that African hip-hop was never a copy of something that happened elsewhere first.
“Most of the time people think that African hip-hop cannot be a part of the American hip-hop scene, and people don’t even think that African hip-hop is as vibrant as American hip-hop, so this exhibition is also to show people that we share similar stories, similar things are happening on the continent just as they have happened in the U.S. . … just to let people know how long we’ve been doing [ hip-hop] for on the continent. Even though hip-hop started in the Bronx, it spread all the way to Africa, and we also experienced similar interactions with the culture.”
“Mending to Preserve” runs at ADAMA through Sept. 5.
