TAELON7: Limbo Engawa

Art Omi presents Limbo Engawa, a two-part site-specific installation by TAELON7, led by architect Juergen Benson-Strohmayer. Conceived as a cross-continental commission between Art Omi and Accra's Limbo Museum, the project debuted in Accra on March 12, 2026, before traveling to Art Omi's 120-acre Sculpture & Architecture Park in New York's Hudson Valley. Across its two presentations, Limbo Engawa asks how architecture can hold space for gathering, exchange, and collective life in radically different geographic and cultural settings.

The work takes its name and its premise from engawa, the Japanese architectural threshold that mediates between interior and exterior, private and public. In Accra, the installation was woven into the skeletal, unfinished concrete structure of Limbo Museum, turning an incomplete building—and the land around it—into a setting for use, care, and encounter. Modular, lightweight components, including oversized daybeds inspired by the woven beds found on Ghanaian construction sites, were built from steel profiles and salvaged billboard strips, drawing farmers, caretakers, and museum visitors into shared use of the space.

At Art Omi, the installation is reconfigured. Set loose from the unfinished building it responded to in Accra, Limbo Engawa becomes a freestanding landscape pavilion, shaped instead by the fields, wetlands, and woods of the Hudson Valley. What was once a threshold between an unfinished building and its surroundings becomes a threshold between architecture and open land—the same architectural language, tuned to a new site, climate, and season.

Rather than two versions of one work, the Accra and Hudson Valley presentations are conceived as parallel interpretations of a single modular system—a way of testing what holds constant, and what changes, when an architectural idea crosses continents.

Founded in 2017 in Accra, Ghana. Juergen Benson-Strohmayer is a chartered architect in Austria and Ghana and the founder of TAELON7. Over the past decade he has lived and worked across Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Austria, developing a body of work that moves between architecture, research, and making. His projects have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Austrian Gallery Belvedere, Shibaura House Tokyo, and MAGAZIN Vienna, and recognized with awards including the Holcim Gold Award for Sustainable Construction and the Fassa Bortolo Silver Medal. Alongside his practice, he has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, and contributed to institutions including the African Futures Institute and Yale Center for Ecosystems + Architecture.

Founded in 2024 in Accra, Ghana, Limbo Museum is an independent institution dedicated to contemporary art, architecture, and design in West Africa. Housed within an unfinished concrete structure on the University of Ghana campus, the museum takes incompleteness as both its physical condition and curatorial premise. Through exhibitions, residencies, research, education, and public programs, Limbo creates a space for artists, architects, designers, and thinkers to experiment across disciplines and to imagine new forms of cultural and civic life. The museum is conceived not as a finished monument, but as an evolving platform shaped by the people and ideas that move through it. Learn more: www.limbomuseum.org

Co-commissioned by Art Omi and Limbo Museum

Support is provided in part by the Austrian Cultural Forum Accra

Consulting Engineer:

Matthew Melnyk, NOUS Engineering

Major support for Art Omi is provided in part by the Francis J. Greenburger Family Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Time Equities Inc., and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

In-kind support provided by Pocketbook Hudson, Preferred Hotel Partner of Art Omi.