Art’Gentiers Gallery welcomes for the first time the exhibition “Bâtarde, Entre les racines et le ciel” by contemporary artist Barbara Asei Dantoni. This bold exhibition reveals the richness of her cultural heritage through a bewitching variety of media. Until June 15, the public is invited to discover the full splendor of her multi-faceted art.
Barbara Asei Dantoni, a French-Italian-Cameroonian artist, captivates viewers with the visual power of her creations. Her immersively beautiful work combines aesthetics and precision, mobilizing a variety of skills in keeping with her identity. From painting to sculpture to weaving, the artist makes hybridity the pillar of her artistic practice. Always referring to her origins, she explores a universe where identities blend and reinvent themselves.
Mainly based in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, she divides her time between France and Cameroon, where her art resonates with her mixed heritage. She expresses her vision in these terms: “Identity is a malleable material, with changing shapes and colors. The imaginary allows me to consider identity in a plural way, as a journey of the soul that connects us to nature, the sacred and the tribe (from the most intimate circle to the whole of humanity).“
Barbara Asei Dantoni transforms the hurtful and violent term “Bâtarde” into a new, syncretic and sublime force. This reinvention of the word’s figurative meaning gives rise to “Bâtarde, Entre les racines et le ciel”, an exhibition in which the artist explores the internal struggle of the in-between, between origins and the aspiration towards the unknown. Adopting a decolonized mindset, inspired by intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, the artist uses contemporary art to highlight the richness and aesthetics of her plural identity.
Barbara Asei Dantoni paints like a weaver, transforming otherness into harmony. Her polychrome roots give birth to works and beings adorned with a thousand colors. Each work carries a secular memory inherited from every continent, blending influences from Africa and South America, with details evoking the beliefs of indigenous tribes. These geographical and visual uncertainties make his works at once landscapes, floral compositions and anthropomorphic representations.
The exhibition “Bâtarde, Entre les racines et le ciel” is presented as a ” All-World “, a concept developed by Edouard Glissant through the notions of Relation and Identity-Relation. This All-World, multiple, diffracted and unpredictable, is a moving space where identities, languages and cultures intersect and transform. Barbara Asei Dantoni depicts the changing, multiple contours of this new world at the Gallery Art’Gentiers in Bordeaux. More than just an exhibition, “Bâtarde, Entre les racines et le ciel” is an innovative celebration, an exploration of identity that offers an interpretation in tune with a topicality that goes beyond borders, beliefs and identities.
The Franco-Italian-Cameroonian artist has enjoyed a remarkable artistic career, marked by studious commitment and exhilarating creativity. In 2015, she won the Paris Design Week international design prize, marking her entry onto the art scene. Since then, she has taken part in numerous group shows and prestigious projects, such as the Biarritz G7 Summit in 2019, a solo show at the AKAA Art Fair in 2022, and the D Dessin salon in Paris. In 2023, she took part in the “MEMORIA, Récits d’une autre histoire” exhibition at the National Museum of Cameroon, and in the BAD+ Art Fair in Bordeaux organized by the Art’Gentiers gallery, among other events.
In December 2022, she completed a creative residency at the Centre d’Art Contemporain le Bel Ordinaire, during which she produced some of the works presented in the exhibition “Bâtarde, Entre les Racines et le Ciel“. She also took part in the “Téléma” project initiated by the association MC2A – Médiations Culturelles Aquitaine Afriques – in Bordeaux in early 2023.
As an artist-designer, Barbara Asei Dantoni founded her own design studio, drawing on her solid experience gained in the design departments of major furniture, luxury goods and architecture companies. In 2009, she launched the Marthe Aimé fashion label, whose collections have been shown at Toronto and London Fashion Weeks. Her career reflects a desire to build bridges between different artistic worlds and to push back the boundaries of creation.