Tuesday 7 April 2026
New to the Richmond Borough Art Collection: Moving image work by Dzifa Benson
Dzifa Benson’s film, The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale, marks an important milestone as the first moving image artwork to join the Borough’s art collection.
Dzifa’s artwork responds to a portrait of Lady Mary Coke (1727-1811), which is also in the Borough’s art collection. Lady Mary Coke was an English noblewoman whose private letters and journal entries, containing candid observations of people in her circle and political figures, were published after her death.
Like Lady Mary Coke, Dzifa’s film comprises a myriad of observations of social life but in contemporary Ghana and in a more poetic manner. In this film, Dzifa has spliced together film clips and photography portraying Accra street scenes and family gatherings from her mother’s house and garden. Dzifa overlays these scenes with a reading of her poem The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale.
Lithographic print of a portrait painting of Lady Mary Coke by Allan Ramsay.
As a curator and artist Dzifa led Orleans House Gallery through the 2022-23 exhibition entitled Lines of Dissent, highlighting and expanding on the stories of those hidden or missed in the Richmond Borough Art Collection, particularly in relation to intersectional voices. Dzifa created this piece for the exhibition.
Dzifa says: ‘Filmed in Ghana in December 2022, the poem itself evolved slowly in the 10 years since I wrote the first draft. I’m a big jazz fan and the poem started life as part of a jam session in which I was improvising with words and a jazz musician was doing the same on an electronic upright bass. This print of the notorious Lady Mary Coke holding a long-handled lute inspired me to complete the poem which has many references to music.’
Still from The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale, 2022 by Dzifa Benson
The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale, poem by Dzifa Benson that accompanies the film
- On the cliff face of this wet indigo, she is the woman who tied water.
- An ivory horn trumpet blares: Afi is in a hurry to dance on the streets of Keta where the sea eats the land at home.
- Sometimes it sounds like the boom of the earth stretching and yawning. Sometimes it’s as erudite as Sogo’s call. Most times it’s as if she’s about to regurgitate a star.
- When I die
Turn no corner
Bend no curve
Take me straight to Agorko
- What kind of food is a song played on Kidi, the mother drum?
- She’ll see you in that space between finger and pluck, between the decay of sound and the auntie who tells you these palm oil plantations have been a 1000 years in the making.
- With spoilt embouchure I carry a sputtering flame in this house of mirrors, rip the mother of all sorrows into the sky.
- She spits stories of the Mami Wata who wears coils of serpents around her neck.
- I’ll tell you of moonlight tree and ceiba, the flamboyance of rainbow eucalyptus, of a bracelet made of elephant hair, of cotton in my ears and blood gurgling in my throat.
- What is the meaning of a red baritone note drawn into the laterite soil on the five spot at midnight?
- Azorlia has covered her eyes with her hands and is using her jaw to see.
Artist Dzifa Benson at the opening of Lines of Dissent at Orleans House Gallery. Photo by Gallery Marso
About the Richmond Borough Art Collection
The Richmond Borough Art Collection is a celebration of place and community, and it continues to grow and develop.
The collection accounts for over 4,000 works of art. Most of the collection is housed on-site at Orleans House Gallery its environmentally controlled, purpose-built picture store, and around 200 works are on public display in exhibitions at Orleans House Gallery, in council buildings and at other local historic houses. These include the municipal offices at York House and the Civic Centre in Twickenham, as well as Garrick Temple, Marble Hill House and Strawberry Hill House.