Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Paris is pleased to unveil a group show featuring recent works by Assoukrou Aké, Jess Atieno, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, François-Xavier Gbré, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien and Roméo Mivekannin.
In "Apparitions", the gallery's artists open a window onto inner spaces. The strange figures emerging from their works and minds seek to transform visitors, to draw them in, to change the way they look at and read the world. In turn, the works evoke the appearance and emergence of feelings, bodies and spirituality.
Assoukrou Aké (1995, Bonoua, Côte d'Ivoire) is a multi-disciplinary artist who freely explores different plastic forms, from installation to sculpture, engraving and textile works, to elaborate what he calls 'a healing narrative'. His work bears the imprint of Africa's social, medical and political history, as well as his own personal story of cultural dualities, silences and revealed words. The artist manages to blend drama, humor and poetry in sensitive works that revolve around the practice of counter-gesture and the search for the reverse.
Jess Atieno (1991, Nairobi, Kenya) For several years, the artist's work has explored notions of place and "at home", the physical and psychic spaces we conceive of as part of our identity. The archival images, 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.
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar (1974, Oran, Algeria) questions the status of the painter, art history and representation as a tool of power. Drawing on her dual culture, she develops other relationships to the image, the object and the sacred, attentive to the cultural dissonances she creates and to the hegemony of Western representations in art history. She draws on Algerian memory to shape a history of violence to which her work responds.
Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux (1995, Les Abymes, Guadeloupe) plunges us into a pictorial narrative in which the anecdotes of a personal history and the chronicles of a plural world are intertwined. His characters, depicted in a moment of pause and introspection, take us into an intimate and often nostalgic space. During his travels, the disruptive experience of a new language in everyday life, of an unfamiliar yet familiar place, the long hours of travel open up a space where identity is free to reinvent itself in other forms and on its own terms.
François-Xavier Gbré (1978, Lille, France) uses the language of architecture and landscape as a witness to memory and social change. The photographer-walker's investigation, fueled by displacement, leads to encounters with a hybrid nature in mutation, in territories marked by history and current events. His photographs always reveal a passage, a trace, an unexpected object contained within structured compositions.
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien (1990, Paris, France), creator of new forms, explorer of materials and signs, defines herself as a healer and storyteller of poems. Like labyrinths or rebus, her works compose new topographies around the themes of femininity, identity and the body, at the crossroads of her Caribbean and West African heritage.
Roméo Mivekannin (1986, Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire) At the crossroads of inherited tradition and the contemporary world, he integrates his creations within an ancestral temporality, crafting his own rituals, echoing the voodoo cosmology so prevalent in Benin. Between painting, sculpture and installation, his universe is multidisciplinary and ambitious. The artist plays with materials and seeks to upset the established boundaries between disciplines, in order to operate both formally and symbolically an act of disruption that is all her own.
