Galerie Cécile Fakhoury – Abidjan is pleased to present Espace de rythmes et de silences, a group exhibition featuring works by Assoukrou Aké, Thibaut Bouedjoro-Camus, Adji Dieye, François-Xavier Gbré, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Carl-Édouard Keïta, Ange-Frédéric Koffi, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Vincent Michéa & Sadikou Oukpedjo. The exhibition invites visitors to explore, through contact with the works, the imperceptible variations in our inner selves :
Who is this person who sets the pace of silence?
Is it me who, upon entering this room, transcends the order of this arrangement?
I don't mean to offend you by using this term, but your title suggests to me that this is a visual arrangement of sounds and absences of sound.
And I can see it clearly.
What do I see, you ask?
Well, look over there, at those monumental women who, frozen in their movements, remind me that I no longer know... that I no longer know how to name the dances of my people.
And here, those who come to remind me that my body is still today the receptacle of a memory that I no longer want to be mine.
They have come here too, yes, right here, to haunt me—these shelters that bear witness to the passage of those I should call my own, but about whom I know nothing anymore.
A space of rhythms and silences, a deafening space that screams the palimpsests of a self grappling with a history I constantly refuse to reread.
A space of the self that no longer wants to look itself in the face, a space of the self that leaves room for the one who is no longer me.
Rhythms of traces, multiple. Slow rhythm, short rhythm.
So let us make way for the artist's hand that governs this symphony. Yes, it is no longer an arrangement, excuse me, it is a symphony.
Deep was my misunderstanding; it is no more now.
In the bursts of this symphony, you gave me time to experience emancipation in four measures, and in the slowness of my wandering, my inner song found a threshold.
Banimbadio Marie-Hélène
