Cape Coast, June 30, GNA - The Acting Director of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB), Mr Joseph Maisie, on Tuesday announced that the GMMB would support young artists to improve upon their skills and exhibit their works.

He said exhibitions are not successful unless they give one the opportunity not only to understand the art forms intellectually, but to see the works in a completely new way. Mr Maisie announced this during the opening of an exhibition of images and texts, extracted from ancient European and mostly Italian publications, mounted by Ricerca E Cooperazione, an Italian NGO in collaboration with the GMMB at the Cape Coast Castle. The exhibition, which is under the theme, "Travels to Mysterious Africa", comprise collections of 67 pieces of ancient European engravings and 54 boards with corresponding descriptions. He said the GMMB has the central cultural history of Ghana and foreign cultures and has a number of commitments particularly in the areas of archaeology, ethnography, conservation and art works, and that its principal objective is to enhance the knowledge and understanding of Ghanaian culture, which has evolved historically through continuous exchange with other countries and cultures. The acting director explained that the GMMB is able to fulfil its activities through collection, recording conservations, research and communication of artefacts and other historical evidence capable of showing the development of culture from its origins to the present day. "Our duty is to make our rich collections more accessible in order to form aspiring opinions of what visitors see," he added. Mr Maisie said the GMMB would therefore collaborate with other institutions and organizations to exhibit the works of artists and called on artists to see the need to exhibit their works at the castle. Mr Fabrizio De Agostini, Italian Ambassador to Ghana, said the exhibition intends to recall the extraordinary human and cultural adventure which lasted for more than three centuries and which first brought the Portuguese, then the Dutch, French, English, Germans and the Danes to settle on the coastlines of Africa and to erect castles and trading posts, in order to facilitate commerce, the search for gold and subsequently the slave trade.

He said the exhibition was first mounted in Accra in 2006 and that it portrayed a "virtual excursion along the African coasts from the mid 15th to the end of the 18th centuries".

He said it was conceived and put together by Centro Studi Archeologia Africana an Institution based in the Museum of Natural History of Milan and was promoted by the Italian Embassy and financed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr James Kofi Gabianu, Deputy Director, Ministry of Chieftaincy and Culture, thanked the Italian Embassy for the gesture and stressed that it would go a long way to enhance the collections of the GMMB. He called on the GMMB to maintain the items to enable them last longer.