Ekow Eshun was born in London to Ghanaian immigrant parents, who had come to Britain from Ghana in the early 1960s, on 27 May 1968. Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing London's most significant public art programme (the empty plinth at Trafalgar Square) and Creative Director of the Calvert 22 Foundation, a leading arts space in East London dedicated to the contemporary culture of Eastern Europe, between 2005 and 2010 he was Artistic and Executive Director of the London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Ekow Eshun lives and works in London, England and is the subject of two portraits held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London.
Curator, writer and editor, Ekow Eshun was born in London to Ghanaian immigrant parents, who came from Ghana to Britain in the early 1960s, on 27 May 1968. Although three years (1971–74) of Eshun's childhood were spent in Accra, Ghana, he was mostly brought up in London. Of his early Ghanaian years he reflects, ‘what remains most telling […] isn’t so much specific memories but sense impressions. Taste, smell – red earth, the abrupt vanishing of the equatorial sun at 6pm, the sight of the ocean for the first time, even the very intense odour of open sewers [...] I’ve carried Ghana with me this way since childhood and I guess it’s left me with a continued sense of Africa as an almost hallucinatory condition rather than a place of fixed, ordered realities’ (Ekow Eshun, 1000 Words website). He attended Kingsbury High School in north west London, later reading history and politics at the London School of Economics (LSE, University of London) where he edited both the Features and the Arts sections of the weekly student newspaper, The Beaver. In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by London Metropolitan University.
Forging a career within the visual arts, between 2005 and 2010 Eshun was Artistic and Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where, under his Directorship, attendance figures rose by 38% from 350,000 to 470,000. In addition, two young artists represented in exhibitions at the ICA, Enrico David and Mark Leckey, were subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2005 Eshun’s memoir, Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa was published by Penguin and nominated for an Orwell Prize the following year. The memoir deals with a return trip to Ghana and with Ghanaian history, exploring issues of race and identity. Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Margaret Busby wrote: ‘His rich memoir, which comes fittingly adorned with a golden jacket designed by Chris Ofili, attempts to answer the question: 'Where are you from?' Eshun’s search for home and identity is sometimes achingly poignant, a story of semi-detachment, of fragmentation and duality, which must have been cathartic to write. 'There is no singularity to truth' is its refrain’ (Margaret Busby, Homing Instinct, The New Statesman, 30 May 2005).
Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing London's most significant public art programme located in Trafalgar Square, as well as Creative Director of the Calvert 22 Foundation, a leading arts space dedicated to the contemporary culture of Eastern Europe, for which he has instigated an award-winning online magazine, The Calvert Journal. Eshun explains that, ‘With both The Calvert Journal, and the exhibitions programme at Calvert 22, I’ve concentrated on photography as a means to try to establish a different narrative about what contemporary Eastern Europe looks like and feels like […] including Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe’ (Ekow Eshun, 1000 Words website). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly magazine Tank and has previously edited Arena and Mined as well as writing frequently for The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Financial Times, The Face and The Observer, Vogue, and The New Statesman. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts shows Saturday Review and Front Row and has also appeared on More4's topical talk show The Last Word.
In 2016, Eshun curated a group exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity. The following year, he edited Africa Modern: Creating the Contemporary Art of a Continent, published by Thames & Hudson, which included contributions by over 50 African photographers and marked the opening of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. In 2018 he organised Africa State of Mind: Creating the Contemporary Art of a Continent at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, an exhibition of the work of 16 artists that subsequently toured to Impressions Gallery, Bradford. In Eshun’s words, Africa State of Mind was ‘oriented around three main themes – Inner Landscapes, Zones of Freedom and Hybrid Cities. Inner Landscapes focuses on photographers whose work offers a deeply personal interpretation of setting or sensibility, in contrast to say, the objective lens of reportage photography. Hybrid Cities documents the African metropolis as a site of rapid transformation. Zones of Freedom brings together photographers whose work explores questions of gender, sexuality and cultural identity’ (Ekow Eshun, 1000 Words website). He explains that it ‘is both a summation of new photographic practice from Africa and an exploration of how contemporary photographers from the continent are exploring ideas of ‘Africanness’ – along the way revealing Africa to be a psychological space as much as a physical territory; a state of mind as much as a place’ (Ekow Eshun, 1000 words website). In 2019 Eshun curated a solo show by British-Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj, at New Art Exchange in Nottingham and Kaleidoscope: Immigration and Modern Britain, a photography exhibition at Somerset House. In 2021 he wrote and presented White Mischief, a three-part documentary on BBC Radio 4 on the history of whiteness. Ekow Eshun lives and works in London. He is the subject of two portraits held in the collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London.