Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present Jess Atieno's solo exhibition Odyssey from November 25, 2023 to April 27, 2024.
For her first solo presentation in Senegal, Jess Atieno has conceived her exhibition as an odyssey, a visual account of her personal journey through photographic archives.
For several years, the artist's work has explored notions of place belonging and home, those physical and psychic spaces that we conceive as part of our identity. The archival images at the time, postcards, documents and maps that sometimes appear as watermarks in the works highlight the complex processes of dispossession - of identities, land and images - that took place during the colonial era. Using fragmentation and collage techniques as narrative tools, Atieno makes effort to occupy the space beyond the visual field of the photograph. In this way, proposing new poetic readings: she opens up a haunting space with untold stories independent of the archive. The titles chosen by the artist evoke a language of the ghostly and poetic remembrance.
The techniques used by the artist in this exhibition also evoke the notion of caring for immaterial, sensitive matter. Atieno attempts to engage the photograph as it is remediated and augmented by the binary code and the half tone. The artist consciously leans into these processes and gestures to complicate, destabilize and fragment these images and build them back together again. These technics further intersect with a haptic collaboration between her body and the physicality of the loom and screen. For her, this corporeal mode of apprehending the photograph encompasses touching, listening and watching in a multi sensory engagement in producing the image.
At the crossroads of these temporalities, Jess Atieno questions the influence of photographic archives of colonial pasts on our present time. By revisiting and reappropriating them in her works, the artist gives them a new language in service of an alternative strategy of representation within the postcolonial.
