At multiple locations across Accra, the capital city of Ghana, including the arterial Ring Road East in Osu and in Legon, Out-of-Home advertising is doing something unusual. Billboards normally designed to sell products and project aspiration have been stripped of all commercial content and covered entirely in second-hand clothing. The result is not a campaign, but a redefinition of how OOH space can function.
Hundreds of garments, T-shirts, jeans, dresses and trousers, are stitched together into a dense textile surface obscuring the advertising faces beneath. They appear without explanation. There is no logo. No brand. No artist credit. No call to action.
Where motorists would normally encounter slogans and lifestyle imagery, they are confronted instead with something heavy, physical and unresolved. The familiar grammar of billboard advertising is interrupted. Visibility remains, but persuasion is absent.
The works form part of BALEBOARDS, an installation series by Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku, a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and civil engineer whose practice engages scale, material reuse and environmental justice. BALEBOARDS sits within his long-term project How to Heal a Broken World – Fragile Origins, Futile Foundations, a decades-long body of work examining the environmental and human afterlives of discarded textiles.
Tieku is the recipient of the 2025 Ellipse Prize, awarded annually by an independent jury to an emerging artist from a selected country. His textile installations have been exhibited at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, at Schloss Augustusburg and the Alte Utting in Germany, and at the AKAA contemporary art fair at the Carreau du Temple in Paris in October 2025.
“I am not providing a solution to the problem,” Tieku says. “But if I can bring people’s attention to this real situation through the use of these unmissable billboards, I can get people talking about it, and hopefully that brings about change.”
Locally, these garments are known as Obroni W’awu, translated as “dead white man’s clothing”. The phrase reflects a global system of overproduction and disposal that remains largely invisible to the consumers who donate the clothes and never see where they end up. That invisible system is made visible on one of the most public and far-reaching media platforms available, Out-of-Home advertising.
The choice of billboard as a medium was deliberate. Each BALEBOARDS site is booked commercially through Alliance Media, an international out-of-home media owner operating across more than 40 countries, following the same process as any advertiser. The distinction lies only in what appears on the structure.
“He understood that the medium itself carries meaning,” says Greg Benatar, Group Director at Alliance Media. “By removing all messaging, Emmanuel allows the billboard to do something it rarely does, making space for reflection rather than persuasion. The results have exceeded what a conventional campaign delivers, and we are in conversation with Emmanuel about taking BALEBOARDS to other cities as the project evolves.”
In doing so, BALEBOARDS reframes the role of outdoor advertising. It moves beyond visibility and into cultural impact. Instead of delivering a commercial message, it interrupts expectation. Instead of driving immediate action, it creates space for reflection at scale.
BALEBOARDS also surfaces a less commercial question for the OOH industry: what else can billboard infrastructure do beyond selling? Direct media owners are uniquely positioned to facilitate this kind of use, as an intermediary-led buy would rarely support a non-commercial booking of this scale, complexity, or duration.
Despite its silence, the installation is gaining organic traction online. Images and short-form videos have circulated across TikTok (over 15,000 views in the weeks following installation) and Instagram (over 20,000 views), extending the reach of the physical sites into digital space. What begins as a moment on a billboard evolves into a wider conversation, demonstrating how Out-of-Home can amplify well beyond its physical location.
Multiple billboards. No message. No branding. Yet a medium proving its power in a completely different way.
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