Born in 1972 in Cotonou, Benin. He works and lives between Paris, Brussels and Cotonou.
Coming from a Beninese and Ukrainian family, Dimitri Fagbohoun grew up in Cameroon before moving in France. The themes and questions he tackles reflect his journey and his history, astride the geographic and cultural frontiers, and his research is inseparable from his own experience and his plural identity.
The series Papa was a Rolling Stone interrogates his identity, through the prism of his own Beninese origins, whether it is with the installation Till the end of time (2013) or with the ceramic masks from the series Faces (2012). His plastic research develops itself within the crossed spaces of his cultures and questions hybrids beliefs, as in the work Refrigerum (2014), an installation inside a confessional, in the video Adiyo (2016) presenting Yoruba divinatory rites, or in the Adiyo ceramic slabs (2016), made from children drawings.
Evolving towards the recovery and reappropriation of the remarkable west African statuary figures in exile, he develops since 2017 a project called Re-Collection, in which masterpieces of the African art known as classic are reproduced and staged by several craftsperson and himself. Becoming hybrid, those forms enter into a new space of representation which integrates the significance of recapturing our own legacy while being part of creation and novelty.
Selected exhibitions: The Unexpected Consequences of History, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Dakar (Sénégal, 2022), L'Esprit du large, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Dakar et Abidjan, 2019), Dakar Biennial (Senegal, 2012, 2018); Musée de la photographie, Saint-Louis (Senegal, 2018); Divine Comedy, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington (USA, 2015); Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi (DRC, 2010); Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Bamako (Mali, 2007, 2010); Festival panafricain, Alger (Algeria, 2009)
Image: Helena, Série Microcosmos II, 2018