Cécile Fakhoury Gallery unveils the cream of tomorrow’s artists in its spaces in Abidjan, Dakar and Paris with the exhibition « ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND »

Although taking place in its spaces in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Dakar, Senegal and Paris, France, the exhibition « ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND » is exceptional and dedicated to the young emerging scene identified with Africa and its diaspora. It is considered a cross-over exhibition that reflects the world that feeds the questioning of these artists.

The exhibition « ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND » reaffirms one of the founding responsibilities of Galerie Cécile Fakhoury : the support of emerging creation and is fully in line with this desire to highlight the young creation of tomorrow in Africa, and those of the African diaspora.

The exhibition « ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND » brings together nine women and six men whose average age is under thirty and who come from ten countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, the United States, South Africa, France and the Ivory Coast.

« ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND » is seen as an abstract scene, a kind of representation of creation, a non-exhaustive proposal to apprehend in their majority the dreams of today’s young artists, their impression of contemporary society, their relationship to memory and custom, the development of self in relation to otherness, the scrutiny of parallel frames of thought, or the redefinition of a delicate link with nature…

This exhibition praises the qualities of the whole by inviting each visitor to take a step beyond the established topographies. Between Abidjan, Dakar and Paris, « ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND » a semantic and inventive space that unfolds in the creative spirit. 

The artists of the exhibition “ABOUT NOW #1 – EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND BEYOND

Lois Arde-Acquah was born in 1992 in Accra, Ghana, where she lives and works. Through performance and installation, Lois Arde-Acquah investigates the ordinary and the thought of redundancy as a vector of experimentation for the body and the psyche in search of new implications and imaginaries.

Abdessamad El Montassir was born in 1989 in Boujdour, Morocco, and lives between Boujdour and Marseille. Her art unfolds at the junction of sociologies, scientific exploration and art. Abdessamad El Montassir sets up reflexive cycles that invite us to reinterrogate history and mapping methods through aggregated or anecdotal narratives and immaterial chronicles.

Jewel Ham was born in 1998 in Charlotte, North Carolina and lives in New York City. She uses painting to propose better approaches to tell a close and free narrative of contemporary African American women, whom she depicts in their everyday lives in a combination of painterly authenticity and blur.

Dorra Mahjoubi was born in 1990 in Tunis and lives and works between Paris and Tunis. Sensitive to an ecological methodology in her art, Dorra Mahjoubi uses painting to fetch covered memories and revive in the present the constitutive charges of the past that advise common and close histories.

Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux was born in Guadeloupe and lives in Nanterre, France. His painting is particularly linked to heritages and emblematic images as well as to Afro-Caribbean spiritualities. As a painter of the everyday, he subtly draws on the legends and iconographic representations of the West Indies while seeking bridges with African history.

Na Chainkua Reindorf was born in 1991 in Ghana and lives in New York. Her multidisciplinary work explores themes of identity, memory, gender and custom. Her recent research has led her to focus on fabric and embroidery, a strong heritage of her Ghanaian culture.

Claudia Tennant was born in 1988 in Johannesburg and lives in Paris. In her work, she seeks to decipher the complexity of pre-colonial African narratives. Using both painting and new computer innovations, such as NFTs, Claudia Tennant weaves together these narratives and current discussions that accentuate post-colonial thinking.

Thibaut Bouedjoro-Camus was born in 1996 in Reims, France, and currently lives in Paris. The environment that emerges from his creation oscillates between unhappiness and poetry, lack and depression. His works transmit clues of the secret, a kind of narrative, where the good would be supplanted by an instinct, whose transmission would be completed through images, faces, tones and bodies.

Carl-Edouard Keïta was born in 1992 in Abidjan and currently lives in New York. These drawings convey a history, and tell of the uncertainty of the place of African artists in France during the 1920s, and convey this reverence of bodies and developments. His work questions the sharing of our heritage between custom and modernity, between Africa and Europe.

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien was born in 1990 in Paris, where she lives today. A maker of new structures, she characterizes herself as a narrator of sonnets. Between complexity and simplicity, these works unfold their implications and invite us to play hopscotch, to remember our adolescence, to gather little by little the path that will allow us from the earth to reach heaven together.

Agnes Waruguru was born in 1994 in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives today. Her works show a delightful way of approaching contemplation and the link between dream and space, between materiality and dream. Agnes Waruguru offers an encounter of contemplation, and takes us with her to obscure but recognizable places, through works that are both translucent and surprising.

Ymane Chabi-Gara was born in 1986 in Paris. She lives and works in Boulogne. Through a series of self-portraits in which she addresses herself as a Hikikomori, the artist questions the human condition, isolation and its various articulations, confinement and her person in general.

Ange Frédéric Koffi is a visual artist born in 1996 in Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Since his time at the Cantonal School of Art in Lausanne, much of his photographic work is hammered into installations that start with the idea of flow, and how in West Africa travel contains its own substance discovering a part of the ordinary.

Fanny Irina was born in 2000 in Bondy and lives in Paris. Through a research made of painting, drawing and video, she tells dreams where characters and creatures are mixed. These minutes out of existence invite to gatherings of characters who embrace and sometimes hold each other, near a unique state where the theme of the egg and the bird is regularly repeated.

Katlego Tlabela is a South African artist born in 1993 in Pretoria where he lives and works. He explores a wide range of mediums. Preoccupied with issues centered on politics, he questions through his work various social and political emergencies in his country. In his « New Rich » series, his work depicts extravagant lifestyles that reflect the newly discerned black world class, which he sees as optimistic and achievable.