Curatorial Ethos
Efie Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Dubai specialising in the representation and advancement of artists of African origin, from the continent and its global diaspora. Founded in 2021 by the Ghanaian-British Mintah family — Valentina, Kwame and Kobi Mintah — it opened its permanent space in 2022 on Al Khayat Avenue, within Dubai's Al Quoz Creative Zone. The name "Efie" means "home" in Twi, the language of Ghana's Akan people, reflecting a programme built around belonging, heritage and identity. The gallery represents and works with leading and emerging African artists including El Anatsui, Aïda Muluneh, Abdoulaye Konaté, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Yaw Owusu and the historic Ghanaian photographer J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije, and positions itself explicitly as a bridge between African art and the Middle East. Beyond exhibitions it runs a residency programme connecting visiting artists with local institutions and communities, and houses Rekord Gallery, a dedicated space for record collectors that reflects the gallery's origins. Its programme is collaborative and curator-led, with recent exhibitions curated by figures including Dexter Wimberly and Brice Arsène Yonkeu.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
Efie Gallery began with a record collection. Before it represented some of the most significant artists on the African continent, the Mintah brothers were planning to exhibit their vinyl at Dubai's All Africa Festival — discs they saw as a complete art form, from cover to liner notes to the music itself. That show became a gallery, and the records never left: Rekord Gallery still sits a floor above the art, so a visit moves from the silence people keep in front of paintings to the conversation a shared song draws out. It is an unusually personal origin for a space that now operates at international scale. What gives Efie its weight is the calibre of that scale. To open with El Anatsui's first solo show in Dubai — and to build a roster that includes Aïda Muluneh, Abdoulaye Konaté and María Magdalena Campos-Pons — is to plant serious, museum-level African art in a city whose gallery scene had largely looked toward Europe, North America and the Middle East. Founded by a family whose own heritage runs to Ghana, the gallery treats "home" not as branding but as method: a residency programme that roots visiting African artists in the local community, and a curatorial line built around belonging, migration and materiality. For a Dubai positioning itself as a crossroads of the global South, Efie supplies something the scene genuinely needed — a permanent, ambitious home for contemporary African art.
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Warehouse 61, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1
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Artists & People
Full directory →Founders
Gallery founders and founding directors.
Valentina Mintah
Valentina Mintah is a Ghanaian-British technology executive and the co-founder of Efie Gallery, which she established in Dubai with her two sons. Her primary career is in global trade technology: she sits on the executive board of the International Chamber of Commerce and has built a reputation in digital trade and supply-chain systems, a world away from the gallery floor. That background informs Efie's ambitions as an international bridge-builder between African art and new markets. Bringing her family's Ghanaian heritage and her own executive experience to the venture, she co-founded Efie in 2021 as a platform to give African artists — established and emerging, from the continent and its diaspora — a serious home in the Gulf, and to foster exchange between African and Middle Eastern cultures.
Kwame Mintah
Kwame Mintah is a co-founder of Efie Gallery and one of the driving forces behind its programme. An art collector who was still a university student when the gallery launched, he conceived the project with his brother Kobi out of a shared passion for collecting — beginning, unexpectedly, with records rather than visual art. Their idea of exhibiting a vinyl collection at Dubai's All Africa Festival in 2021, on the conviction that records are among the richest of art forms, grew into Efie Gallery and its companion Rekord Gallery. Since then Kwame has helped shape a roster spanning El Anatsui, James Barnor, Yaw Owusu, Isshaq Ismail, Slawn, Maggie Otieno and others, articulating the gallery's mission as a bridge between high-value African art and the Middle East, and championing Dubai as the right launchpad for that vision.
Kobi Mintah
Kobi Mintah is a photographer, filmmaker and co-founder of Efie Gallery, which he launched alongside his mother Valentina and brother Kwame. His background in image-making informs the visual and curatorial sensibility of the gallery, and he was central to its unusual genesis: the plan he and Kwame developed to exhibit their record collection at the All Africa Festival, framing vinyl as a layered art form of cover, liner notes and sound. That project became Efie Gallery and its companion Rekord Gallery, the record-collectors' space Kobi helped establish a floor above the main gallery. As a co-founder he has helped guide Efie's growth into an internationally recognised platform for contemporary African art and its diaspora.