Exhibitions : The Cecile Fakhoury Gallery presents a series of travels

Since December 4, 2020 and until March 2021, the Galerie Cecile Fakhoury offers a series of exhibitions in its Ivorian and Senegalese premises. Between identity constructions and memories, the artists take us through their works in a plural exploration. On the program: a group exhibition of five young women in Dakar and two solo exhibitions in Abidjan.

If you are passing through Dakar

The Cecile Fakhoury Gallery in Dakar hosts from December 04, 2020 to February 19, 2021, the group exhibition I have this memory, it is not my own by five young female artists: Mariam Abouzid Souali, Jess Atieno, Binta Diaw, Rahima Gambo and Adji Dieye. Through a set of practices as varied as installation, video, tapestry and painting, the exhibition proposes to question our contemporary lives through the “architectures” that compose them.

Mariam Abouzid Souali, Moroccan, currently lives and works in Tetouan, Morocco. Her works plunge us into a universe linked to childhood: that of play. The childlike figures of the artist evolve through landscapes with familiar architecture and yet always imbued with a disturbing strangeness, places from which children are usually absent. The juxtaposition between these two worlds, that of childhood play that the artist connects to the rural world, and that of liberal globalization, allows Mariam Abouzid Souali to weave sensitive links and leads us to question the functioning of our world, at several speeds between its inequalities of development and the destructions that the unbridled race for development brings about.

Kenyan artist Jess Atieno lives and works in Chicago, USA. Through a multi-disciplinary approach including sculpture, printmaking and installations, the artist questions the definition of social norms and the issues of power linked to dominant regimes of representation. Her latest research focuses on deconstructing the workings of our subconscious and sheds light on how conscious and unconscious legacies determine our perception of the world, but also the interpretation we make of it and how we define our historical, political, economic and cultural identities accordingly.

Binta Diaw, an artist of Senegalese origin born in Milan, Italy, where she lives and works, is constantly challenging the dominance of a Eurocentric perspective. Binta Diaw’s plastic research is part of a philosophical reflection on the social phenomena that define our contemporary world, such as migration, the notion of belonging or the question of gender. Working with materials such as earth, chalk, ropes, synthetic hair, rolled flags, the artist takes us on an exploration of the multiple layers of identity; her own as a black woman in a Europeanized world; ours and that of a continent at the crossroads of history and geography.

Born in London, UK, Rahima Gambo, Nigerian, lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria. She turns to the visual arts after having carried out numerous transmedia documentary projects for the press. Focusing on the figure of “walking” as a process, she explores the potential cartographies that arise from it, through immersive works mixing installations, photographs, videos, sounds and documentary approaches. Psycho-spiritual geography, socio-political, urban environment, autobiographical thought are all themes that irrigate the artist’s practice and make her reflection a committed position in the world.

Adji Dieye, an Italian and Senegalese artist, lives and works between Senegal, Italy and Switzerland. His artistic practice questions the transmedia nature of the photographic medium and is interested in the role and legacies of epistemology in the contemporary construction of the self. Through her projects, the artist addresses the visual representation and commodification of identity while critiquing cultural norms and stereotypical roles. Recently, Adji Dieye focused on the National Archives of Senegal in Dakar. This research is an opportunity for the artist to highlight forms of dialogue and recontextualization of historical knowledge in the contemporary neo-liberal and postcolonial context.

The exhibition I have this memory, it is not my own is organized as part of the ninth edition of the Partcours in Dakar, Senegal, whose objective is to make known the districts of the city and its suburbs through the places of art that animate it. With this exhibition, the gallery reinforces the visibility given to women artists, the opening to English-speaking artists and continues its work of prospective research of the new generation of artists.

If you are in Abidjan

The Cécile Fakhoury Gallery in Abidjan presents from December 12, 2020 to March 6, 2021 two solo exhibitions: Comme la jungle, la mer by the Senegalese artist Kassou Seydou and Un est multiple, the first solo exhibition of the young Guadeloupean artist Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux.

Comme la jungle, la mer, Main gallery

From Dakar to Abidjan, Kassou Seydou takes us on a plastic and poetic odyssey around the journey through some fifteen unpublished works. On September 26, 2002, the ship the Joola – which connects the port of Ziguinchor in Casamance, Senegal, the artist’s native land, with the port of Dakar – was wrecked. Of the human drama, which still marks the consciences of several generations of Senegalese, one question remains: what still drives us to travel? From the chosen journey cheerfully to the journey that we impose or that is imposed on us, Kassou Seydou stages in imposing frescoes the meanders of both spiritual and physical crossings. Always sensitive to the social issues that affect his country and the world as a whole, Kassou Seydou invites us to question our prism of perceptions and to embrace, in a generous and human gesture, the complex relationships between the construction of identity and otherness.

Kassou Seydou’s work, poetic and close to narrative, reveals a vision of an altered and complexified world. With his warm palette and his animated characters, the artist makes the observation of a disordered world. Kassou Seydou’s solo exhibitions, presented by Cécile Fakhoury Gallery from 2017, have met with great African and international success. There is no doubt that this will also be the case with this one.

One is Multiple, Project Space

Born in 1995 in the West Indies on the island of Guadeloupe, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux now lives and works in Paris. Through his works, the artist explores an open and vibrant approach to the relationship between peoples and the imaginary. With the exhibited works, a series of portraits taken from family memories, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux plunges us into a pictorial narrative where anecdotes from a personal history and chronicles of a plural world are intertwined. Un est multiple takes us back to the African cosmogonies that populate the artist’s life as well as his canvases. The constant mixing of references, the superimposition of temporalities, the symbols present in each work, everything leads us into a sensory experience whose ancestral Guadeloupean roots radiate to a contemporary Africa and vice versa.

With this first solo exhibition of the young artist Ellaj Lincy Delourmeaux, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury pursues an ambitious work of promotion and support of the contemporary African scene.

The Gallery, which opened its doors in September 2012 in Abidjan and spring 2018 in Dakar and Paris, works to promote contemporary art on the African continent. It offers visibility to creativity and contemporary artistic diversity in Africa through its programming of solo and group exhibitions, but also through its participation in international fairs and biennials and through its collaborations with foreign galleries. In March 2020, in Abidjan, Cécile Fakhoury Gallery opened Project Space, an exhibition space located opposite the main gallery and dedicated to young creation as well as special projects.