Jess Atieno lights up Dakar’s Cécile Fakhoury Gallery with her captivating exhibition entitled ” Odyssey “. Until April 27, 2024, the Kenyan artist bewitches the Dakar public by ingeniously unveiling the milestones of her artistic career. Through the lens of her camera, she plunges us into a moving retrospective of her artistic evolution.
For her first solo exhibition in Senegal, Jess Atieno invites us on a unique visual voyage, an odyssey retracing her personal journey through photographic archives. For many years, she has been exploring notions of belonging and the spaces – both physical and psychic – that shape our identity. Using vintage archival images, postcards and documents subtly integrated into her creations, Jess Atieno sheds light on the complex process of dispossession of land, images and identities during the colonial era.
The originality and narrative character of her works emerge from her technique of fragmentation and collage, which pushes back the boundaries of photographic space. By combining innovative creative methods, Jess Atieno offers a poetic and unprecedented reading of her creations, creating an enchanting dimension where exclusive narratives come to life beyond the archive. The titles of her works seem to be the language of a ghostly, poetic memory.
As part of her “Odyssey” exhibition, the contemporary artist also explores creative techniques evoking the care given to delicate, immaterial matter. By manipulating photography through binary code and halftones, Jess Atieno seeks to complexify, fragment and deconstruct images, then reconstruct them in a new visual light.
These artistic processes are interwoven with a tactile collaboration between her body and the materiality of the loom and screen. For the contemporary artist, this bodily approach to photography encompasses touching, listening and looking in a multisensory experience of image-making.
By exploring photographic archives from colonial periods and reinterpreting them in her work, Jess Atieno questions the influence of these pasts on our present. By offering them a new artistic language in the service of an alternative postcolonial representation, she invites us to rethink our relationship with these archives and our collective history.
