Through this new body of work, developed over the past ten months for Art Basel Paris, Carl-Édouard Keïta reveals the contrasts that shaped the young Ivorian nation during its period of economic prosperity, known as the “Ivorian Miracle” (1960–1980), under the leadership of its first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
Drawing, among other sources of inspiration, on the cinema of Roger Gnoan M’Bala, particularly his portrayal of a socially fragmented Côte d’Ivoire and the rise of a charming social climber embodied by the elegant seducer in Amanié(1972), Keïta chronicles the emergence of a new Abidjan bourgeoisie caught up in a process of Westernization. This transformation was fueled by the steady importation of new social customs and the emergence of a hybrid sense of elegance shaped between Paris and Abidjan.
Through a meticulously crafted interplay of references, informed by research into private collections and the exceptionally rare archives of the cultural periodical Ivoire Dimanche, Carl-Édouard Keïta brings to the surface, with millimetric precision, the buried fault lines of the Ivorian Miracle, tracing its underlying tensions across the period’s chronology. Revisiting the histories of Cubism and Dadaism from a contemporary Ivorian perspective, he gradually reveals the coexistence of multiple worlds and of economic, social, and religious realities. His works thus question the circulation of forms and the ways in which collective memory continues to shape the present.
Among other facets of his research, the artist examines the rise of religious extremism in rural Côte d’Ivoire during the final years of the Ivorian Miracle. Also explored by filmmaker Roger Gnoan M’Bala in his film Au nom du Christ (1993), this critique echoes the emergence of prophetic movements, whose most prolific figure in the 1980s was the prophet Gbahié Koudou Jeannot, nicknamed the “Black Christ.” Carl-Édouard Keïta portrays this figure in an almost sacralizing work, placing him in dialogue with a scene depicting a Western audience in a state of ecstatic admiration before a Baoulé statue. The scene was discovered in Albert Guillaume’s 1920 illustration Salon de Paris – La maladie noire (The Craze for African Art). This juxtaposition establishes a dialogue between Europe’s artistic fascination with Ivorian sculpture and its rejection within Ivorian spiritual contexts, where prophetic movements called on communities to turn away from sacred statuary.
