The exhibition « Culture Lost and Learned by Heart » by Adji Dieye presented until April 21, 2022 at C/O Berlin in Germany sheds light on the groups of colonized people and the reasons that allow them to constitute themselves as a community, a reason related to a desire for self-conception.
« Culture Lost and Learned by Heart » questions what can be done if the past is only a collection of border chronicles? This question is at the heart of the work of the Italian-Senegalese artist Adji Dieye who conducted a visual examination of the iconographic collection of the National Archives of Senegal. She questions the documented substance and developments of past history as a method of revealing the wickedness and violence present in the organization and its seemingly impartial substance.
For her exhibition « Culture Lost and Learned by Heart », artist Adji Dieye created a video projection, wall works and installations, an indirect yet historical exploration of Senegal. These sculptures were created by interpreting photos in marked bitmap matrices, used as templates for the silkscreens.
Archives Nationales du Sénégal, Iconographie
Adji Dieye has printed photos from her own archives as well as those of the national archives onto lengths of several meters of silk texture, and mounted them on fabricated iron borders. In one of these works, she performs a visual exchange between two periods of Senegalese history. Some of the images date back to the time of the French pilgrims and show the founding of the national territory of Senegal, while others relate to the current situation in Senegal today.
By inscribing over a broad period of time, Adji Dieye raises doubt about the possibility of history as a direct movement in which one occasion clearly continues the next. Her choice of materials for the installations summons the movements of a paper printing machine and rejuvenates the narratives they present.
By selecting « Culture Lost and Learned by Heart » for an outreach, the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2021 shows the new procedure of an extended narrative practice that creates versions of existing images.
The jury collectively chose Adji Dieye from nearly 100 entries selected from around the world. Her project continues the groundwork begun by 2020 winner Anna Ehrenstein, examining the topics of post-expansionism and the national state in greater depth in Senegal and using an entirely different approach. In her exchange with the installation in relation to visual archiving, the artist questions her capacity as a protector of truth.
Adji Dieye
The artist Adji Dieye is of Senegalese origin and was born in 1991 in Milan. She lives and works between Senegal, Italy and Switzerland. She holds a degree in new artistic technologies from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Italy, and an MFA from the University of the Arts of Zurich in Switzerland.
Adji Dieye‘s work has been exhibited in a few global exhibitions such as the twelfth edition of the Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine in Bamako in 2019, the exhibition « Of bread, wine, vehicles, security and harmony at the Kunsthalle Wien » in Vienna in 2019; at the Clark House Art Center in Mumbai, 2019; or at the Lagos Photo Festival in 2018 and selected for the fourteenth Dakar Biennale.
Recall that the exhibition « Culture Lost and Learned by Heart » by Adji Dieye presented until April 21, 2022 at C/O Berlin in Germany.