Regula Tschumi »

Buried in Style

Exhibition: 6 Jul 2026 – 4 Oct 2026

Buried in Style
Regula Tschumi, Nana Otafritsa (front) and his Coffin Dancers escort the hearse that will take the deceased back to the village the evening before the funeral. Volta Region, Regula Tschumi, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Through Buried in Style, Regula Tschumi explores the contemporary transformations of funerary rituals in southern Ghana, particularly within Ga culture in the Greater Accra region, where death becomes a space of creativity, memory, and social prestige. Far from being solely an occasion for mourning, funerals emerge as collective celebrations in which the relationship between the living and their ancestors is reaffirmed at the heart of local cosmologies.

At the center of this project are Ghanaian figurative coffins—remarkable vernacular sculptures that reflect the profession, status, life journey, or aspirations of the deceased. Rooted in a tradition that continues to evolve, they embody a productive tension between ritual heritage, prestige economy, and formal imagination.

Tschumi’s work, informed by her background as an anthropologist, art historian, and photographer, reveals a visual culture in which forms, objects, and gestures play an essential role in shaping social bonds. Here, aesthetics appear not merely as decoration, but as a means of inscribing loss within a shared and living symbolic order.