Arts Collaboratory
Arts Collaboratory is an international network and program initiated by the Dutch organizations Hivos and DOEN Foundation in 2007, in collaboration with the Mondriaan Foundation. It supports independent visual arts organizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America—particularly in contexts where resources for contemporary art are limited. The program promotes artistic exchange, collective learning, and social innovation, empowering organizations to build sustainable ecosystems for creative and community-driven practices.
Through long-term support programs and project grants for Visual Arts and Social Innovation, Arts Collaboratory fosters collaboration among art spaces that prioritize experimentation, dialogue, and transformative social impact. The Nubuke Foundation is proud to be part of this global network, engaging in shared research, co-learning, and creative exchange with peer institutions around the world.
CDCD
CONTESTED DESIRES: Constructive Dialogues (CDCD) is a three-year international arts and heritage program bringing together twenty-two artists for residencies, exhibitions, and knowledge exchange workshops across Europe and Africa. The program explores how centuries of empire-building—from the Greeks and Romans to the Ottomans, Venetians, and later colonial powers—have shaped and complicated cultural identities worldwide. It reflects on how histories of exploitation, trade, and migration continue to influence how communities understand themselves and each other today.
At its core, CDCD challenges the divisive forces shaping contemporary societies, promoting dialogue, collaboration, and understanding across borders. The Nubuke Foundation proudly participates as one of the partner institutions, hosting Ghanaian artists Nana Opoku (AFROSCOPE) and Elisabeth Efua Sutherland, whose practices engage deeply with questions of memory, heritage, and identity within global and local contexts.
Google Arts & Culture
The Nubuke Foundation in Ghana, with Assemble in the UK, and the Textile Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, partnered on a digital project aimed at creating a multicultural learning community in close collaboration with artists and crafts(wo)men to stimulate creative exchanges of artisanal and contemporary art practices. In addition, the project focused on collating, disseminating, and further developing indigenous knowledge and skill to foster its preservation and promising passage into the future.
With extensive documentation of what is already taking place in Wa ongoing, the next step is to build online and digital tools to exchange design ideas between makers in Ghana, the UK, and beyond, and long term we imagine residency programmes and new globally marketable products.
We believe in preserving existing knowledge and sustaining local communities economically. The archive resulting from this will be an open, de-colonial, non-judgemental, flexible place of exchange.